How to format your references using the CBE - Life Sciences Education citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for CBE - Life Sciences Education (LSE). 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Deweerdt, S. (2012). Comparative biology: Looking for a master switch. Nature, 492(7427), S10-1.

A journal article with 2 authors

Bonadonna, F., & Nevitt, G. A. (2004). Partner-specific odor recognition in an Antarctic seabird. Science (New York, N.Y.), 306(5697), 835.

A journal article with 3 authors

Mitchell, R. N., Kilian, T. M., & Evans, D. A. D. (2012). Supercontinent cycles and the calculation of absolute palaeolongitude in deep time. Nature, 482(7384), 208–211.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Donnelly, S. E., Birtcher, R. C., Allen, C. W., Morrison, I., Furuya, K., Song, M., … Dahmen, U. (2002). Ordering in a fluid inert gas confined by flat surfaces. Science (New York, N.Y.), 296(5567), 507–510.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Waller, F. J. (2011). Writing Chemistry Patents and Intellectual Property. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Dengel, A. R., Berns, K., Breuel, T. M., Bomarius, F., & Roth-Berghofer, T. R. (Eds.). (2008). KI 2008: Advances in Artificial Intelligence: 31st Annual German Conference on AI, KI 2008, Kaiserslautern, Germany, September 23-26, 2008. Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Atkinson, K., & Han, W. (2012). Approximation Theory. In W. Han (Ed.), Spherical Harmonics and Approximations on the Unit Sphere: An Introduction (pp. 131–163). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

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 CBE - Life Sciences Education.

Blog post

Hale, T. (2015, October 22). Meet The Most Complete Juvenile T. Rex Ever Discovered. Retrieved October 30, 2018, from IFLScience website: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/jane-most-complete-adolescent-t-rex-ever-discovered/

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. (1978). Better Criteria Needed for Awarding Grants for School Desegregation (No. HRD-78-36). Washington, DC: 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

Jensen, M. E. (2010). A comparison of school psychologists’ and school counselors’ ability to identify cognitive abilities underlying basic academic tasks (Doctoral dissertation). Capella University, Minneapolis, MN.

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

Crow, K. (2001, August 26). Hotel Developer Recasts Himself As an Angel for Old Synagogues. New York Times, p. 144.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Deweerdt, 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Bonadonna & Nevitt, 2004; Deweerdt, 2012).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Bonadonna & Nevitt, 2004)
Three authors: (Mitchell, Kilian, & Evans, 2012)
6 or more authors: (Donnelly et al., 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	CBE - Life Sciences Education
Abbreviation	CBE Life Sci. Educ.
ISSN (online)	1931-7913
Scope	General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology Education