How to format your references using the DNA and Cell Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for DNA and Cell Biology (DNA). 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

Good MF. Immunology. Pasteur Approach to a Malaria Vaccine May Take the Lead. Science 2013;341(6152):1352–1353.

A journal article with 2 authors

Fujii N and Graybiel AM. Representation of Action Sequence Boundaries by Macaque Prefrontal Cortical Neurons. Science 2003;301(5637):1246–1249.

A journal article with 3 authors

Krauss LM, Dodelson S and Meyer S. Primordial Gravitational Waves and Cosmology. Science 2010;328(5981):989–992.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

He X, He X, Dave VP, et al. The Zinc Finger Transcription Factor Th-POK Regulates CD4 versus CD8 T-Cell Lineage Commitment. Nature 2005;433(7028):826–833.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Marti P. Theory of Structures. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA: Weinheim, Germany; 2013.

An edited book

Ahsanullah M. Normal and Student´s t Distributions and Their Applications. (Kibria BMG and Shakil M. eds). Atlantis Studies in Probability and Statistics. Atlantis Press: Paris; 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

Xu T, Zhou J and Wang Y. A Variation of Local Directional Pattern and Its Application for Facial Expression Recognition. In: Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition: International Conference, SIP 2011, Held as Part of the Future Generation Information Technology Conference FGIT 2011, in Conjunction with GDC 2011, Jeju Island, Korea, December 8-10, 2011. Proceedings. (Kim T-H, Adeli H, Ramos C, et al. eds). Communications in Computer and Information Science Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg; 2011; pp. 36–47.

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 DNA and Cell Biology.

Blog post

Davis J. Why Do Cats Purr? IFLScience; 2015. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/why-do-cats-purr/ [Last accessed: 10/30/2018].

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. Department of Education Grant Award. U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC; 1992.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Alexander M. Reasoning Processes Used by Paramedics to Solve Clinical Problems. Doctoral dissertation. George Washington University: Washington, DC; 2009.

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. Supreme Court Allows Arizona To Use New Voter-ID Procedure. New York Times 2006;A10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Good, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Fujii and Graybiel, 2003; Good, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Fujii and Graybiel, 2003)
Three or more authors: (He et al., 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	DNA and Cell Biology
ISSN (print)	1044-5498
ISSN (online)	1557-7430
Scope