How to format your references using the Nature Chemical Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Nature Chemical Biology. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Download the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

Dolgin, E. Devices: Artificial inspiration. Nature 489, S12-4 (2012).

A journal article with 2 authors

Laanisto, L. & Hutchings, M. J. Comment on ‘Worldwide evidence of a unimodal relationship between productivity and plant species richness’. Science 350, 1177 (2015).

A journal article with 3 authors

Amari, T., Canou, A. & Aly, J.-J. Characterizing and predicting the magnetic environment leading to solar eruptions. Nature 514, 465–469 (2014).

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Lanzetti, L., Palamidessi, A., Areces, L., Scita, G. & Di Fiore, P. P. Rab5 is a signalling GTPase involved in actin remodelling by receptor tyrosine kinases. Nature 429, 309–314 (2004).

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Bajpai, P. Environmentally Friendly Production of Pulp and Paper. (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010).

An edited book

Timberlake, T. K. Classical Mechanics with Maxima. (Springer, 2016).

A chapter in an edited book

Cales, R. Something Old & Borrowed. in Glee and New Directions for Social Change (eds. Johnson, B. C. & Faill, D. K.) 69–79 (SensePublishers, 2015).

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Nature Chemical Biology.

Blog post

Carpineti, A. Beauty Of The Cosmos Revealed In Stunning Astronomy Photographer Of The Year 2016 Images. IFLScience (2016).

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office. Default Rates at HBCUs. (1994).

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Shaw, R. M. The influence of organizational culture on employee attitudes towards information security policy. (Capella University, 2012).

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Wagner, J. Unlikely Contributors Give Mets Hope. New York Times B9 (2016).

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

This sentence cites one reference ¹.
This sentence cites two references ^1,2.
This sentence cites four references ^1–4.

About the journal

Full journal title	Nature Chemical Biology
Abbreviation	Nat. Chem. Biol.
ISSN (print)	1552-4450
ISSN (online)	1552-4469
Scope	Cell Biology Molecular Biology

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