How to format your references using the Cell Systems citation style

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

Amos, L.A. (2008). Biochemistry. Pressing levers or pulling strings? Science 322, 1647–1648.

A journal article with 2 authors

Friedman, N., and Schuldiner, M. (2010). Genetics. The DNA damage road map. Science 330, 1327–1328.

A journal article with 3 authors

Catling, D.C., Zahnle, K.J., and McKay, C. (2001). Biogenic methane, hydrogen escape, and the irreversible oxidation of early Earth. Science 293, 839–843.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Chauhan, P., Jain, R., Dey, B., and Tyagi, A.K. (2013). Adjunctive immunotherapy with α-crystallin based DNA vaccination reduces Tuberculosis chemotherapy period in chronically infected mice. Sci. Rep. 3, 1821.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Das, J.C. (2015). Power System Harmonics and Passive Filter Designs (John Wiley & Sons, Inc).

An edited book

Sirgy, M.J., Phillips, R., and Rahtz, D. eds. (2013). Community Quality-of-Life Indicators: Best Cases VI (Springer Netherlands).

A chapter in an edited book

Smith, D., and Friesen, J. (2011). Interacting with Device Hardware and Media. In Android Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, J. Friesen, ed. (Apress), pp. 201–255.

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 Systems.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). New Species Of Peacock Spider Described. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/another-magnificent-species-peacock-spider-described/.

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 (1993). U.S.-EC Aircraft Agreement (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

Lamanna, C.A. (2012). The structure and function of subalpine ecosystems in the face of climate change.

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

Vecsey, G. (2010). Jordan’s No. 23 Just Isn’t the Retiring Type. New York Times, SP6.

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 Systems
Abbreviation	Cell Syst.
ISSN (print)	2405-4712
ISSN (online)	2405-4720
Scope