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

Binzel, R.P. (2012). Planetary science. A golden spike for planetary science. Science 338, 203–204. .

A journal article with 2 authors

Warner, D.A., and Shine, R. (2008). The adaptive significance of temperature-dependent sex determination in a reptile. Nature 451, 566–568. .

A journal article with 3 authors

Aarts, H., Custers, R., and Marien, H. (2008). Preparing and motivating behavior outside of awareness. Science 319, 1639. .

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Li, B., Chen, D., Wang, J., Yan, Z., Jiang, L., Deliang Duan, He, J., Luo, Z., Zhang, J., and Yuan, F. (2014). MOFzyme: Intrinsic protease-like activity of Cu-MOF. Sci. Rep. 4, 6759. .

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bell, S. (2005). Lean Enterprise Systems (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd).

An edited book

(2016). The Economics of the Global Environment: Catastrophic Risks in Theory and Policy (Cham: Springer International Publishing).

A chapter in an edited book

Sundar, S. (2014). A Steady-State Genetic Algorithm for the Dominating Tree Problem. In Simulated Evolution and Learning: 10th International Conference, SEAL 2014, Dunedin, New Zealand, December 15-18, 2014. Proceedings, G. Dick, W.N. Browne, P. Whigham, M. Zhang, L.T. Bui, H. Ishibuchi, Y. Jin, X. Li, Y. Shi, P. Singh, et al., eds. (Cham: Springer International Publishing), pp. 48–57.

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

Davis, J. (2015). New Report Shows How Marine Mammals Are Thriving In Central London (IFLScience).

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 (1982). Questions Designed To Aid Managers and Auditors in Assessing the ADP Planning Process (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

Vu, M.K. (2015). Reducing mental health provider burnout through wellness: A grant proposal. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach.

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

Greenhouse, L. (2008). 3 Defining Opinions. New York Times WK4. .

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Binzel, 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Binzel, 2012; Warner and Shine, 2008).

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

Two authors: (Warner and Shine, 2008)
Three or more authors: (Li et al., 2014)

About the journal

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

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