How to format your references using the Cell Reports citation style

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

Catterall, W.A. (2001). Physiology. A one-domain voltage-gated sodium channel in bacteria. Science 294, 2306–2308.

A journal article with 2 authors

Shen, B., and Goodman, H.M. (2004). Uridine addition after microRNA-directed cleavage. Science 306, 997.

A journal article with 3 authors

Sund, J., Andér, M., and Aqvist, J. (2010). Principles of stop-codon reading on the ribosome. Nature 465, 947–950.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Ghez, A.M., Morris, M., Becklin, E.E., Tanner, A., and Kremenek, T. (2000). The accelerations of stars orbiting the Milky Way’s central black hole. Nature 407, 349–351.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Khan, M.M., and Islam, M.R. (2012). Zero Waste Engineering (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

An edited book

Cremers, D., Reid, I., Saito, H., and Yang, M.-H. eds. (2015). Computer Vision -- ACCV 2014: 12th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, Singapore, Singapore, November 1-5, 2014, Revised Selected Papers, Part I (Springer International Publishing).

A chapter in an edited book

McCartney, L.N. (2015). Analytical Methods of Predicting Performance of Composite Materials. In Failure and Damage Analysis of Advanced Materials CISM International Centre for Mechanical Sciences., H. Altenbach and T. Sadowski, eds. (Springer), pp. 191–254.

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 Cell Reports.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2015). Large Feathered, Winged Dinosaur Was Close Relative Of Velociraptor. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/large-carnivorous-dinosaur-had-bird-wings/.

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 (2004). Homeland Security: Efforts Under Way to Develop Enterprise Architecture, but Much Work Remains (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

Backfish, M. (2013). Electron Cloud in Steel Beam Pipe vs Titanium Nitride Coated and Amorphous Carbon Coated Beam Pipes in Fermilab’s Main Injector.

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

Medina, J. (2012). In California, City Teeters On Brink of Bankruptcy. New York Times, A15.

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	Cell Reports
Abbreviation	Cell Rep.
ISSN (print)	2211-1247
Scope	General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology