How to format your references using the Cancer Cell citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Cancer Cell. 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

Pockley, P. (2000). Tax blow leaves Australian science reeling. Nature 405, 387.

A journal article with 2 authors

Vaquero, L.M., and Cebrian, M. (2013). The rich club phenomenon in the classroom. Sci. Rep. 3, 1174.

A journal article with 3 authors

De Pontieu, B., Erdélyi, R., and James, S.P. (2004). Solar chromospheric spicules from the leakage of photospheric oscillations and flows. Nature 430, 536–539.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Kistler, A.D., Caicedo, A., Abdulreda, M.H., Faul, C., Kerjaschki, D., Berggren, P.-O., Reiser, J., and Fornoni, A. (2014). In vivo imaging of kidney glomeruli transplanted into the anterior chamber of the mouse eye. Sci. Rep. 4, 3872.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bouchet, O. (2012). Wireless Optical Communications (John Wiley & Sons, Inc).

An edited book

Furuichi, T., and Thompson, J. eds. (2008). The Bonobos: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation (Springer).

A chapter in an edited book

Mišćenić, E. (2016). Legal Translation vs. Legal Certainty in EU Law. In Legal Risks in EU Law: Interdisciplinary Studies on Legal Risk Management and Better Regulation in Europe, E. Mišćenić and A. Raccah, eds. (Springer International Publishing), pp. 87–107.

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 Cancer Cell.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2015). Dogs May Have Originated In Central Asia. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/dogs-were-domesticated-central-asia/.

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 (1979). Review of Selected Contracts Awarded by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (U.S. Government Printing Office).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Pigott, C. (2016). School Resource Officers and the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Discovering Trends of Expulsions in Public Schools.

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

Kelly, K., and Bray, C. (2017). Held to Account. New York Times, B1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference ².
This sentence cites two references ^2,4.
This sentence cites four references ^2,4,6,8.

About the journal

Full journal title	Cancer Cell
Abbreviation	Cancer Cell
ISSN (print)	1535-6108
ISSN (online)	1878-3686
Scope	Cancer Research Cell Biology Oncology