How to format your references using the Experimental Cell Research citation style

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

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
[1]
F.J. Sulloway, Psychology. Birth order and intelligence, Science. 316 (2007) 1711–1712.
A journal article with 2 authors
[1]
J.O. Mudd, D.A. Kass, Tackling heart failure in the twenty-first century, Nature. 451 (2008) 919–928.
A journal article with 3 authors
[1]
D.A. Warner, T. Uller, R. Shine, Transgenerational sex determination: the embryonic environment experienced by a male affects offspring sex ratio, Sci. Rep. 3 (2013) 2709.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
[1]
M. Bucciantini, E. Giannoni, F. Chiti, F. Baroni, L. Formigli, J. Zurdo, N. Taddei, G. Ramponi, C.M. Dobson, M. Stefani, Inherent toxicity of aggregates implies a common mechanism for protein misfolding diseases, Nature. 416 (2002) 507–511.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
[1]
Center for Chemical Process Safety, Guidelines for Process Safety in Batch Reaction Systems, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 1999.
An edited book
[1]
G. Clément, A. Bukley, eds., Artificial Gravity, Springer, New York, NY, 2007.
A chapter in an edited book
[1]
F. Sekiya, A. Sugimoto, Discrete Polynomial Curve Fitting to Noisy Data, in: R.P. Barneva, V.E. Brimkov, J.K. Aggarwal (Eds.), Combinatorial Image Analaysis: 15th International Workshop, IWCIA 2012, Austin, TX, USA, November 28-30, 2012. Proceedings, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012: pp. 59–74.

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 Experimental Cell Research.

Blog post
[1]
B. Taub, Smoking A Pack Of Cigarettes A Day Causes 150 Mutations A Year In Every Lung Cell, IFLScience. (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/smoking-pack-cigarettes-day-causes-150-mutations-year-every-lung-cell/ (accessed October 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
[1]
Government Accountability Office, Schools and Workplaces: An Overview of Successful and Unsuccessful Practices, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1995.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
[1]
A.S. Wickramage, Analysis of Magnaporthe oryzae homologs of Histoplasma capsulatum RYP genes, Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, 2013.

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
[1]
M.D. Shear, Y. Alcindor, Democrats on Tightrope In Immigration Debate, New York Times. (2017) A13.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal titleExperimental Cell Research
AbbreviationExp. Cell Res.
ISSN (print)0014-4827
ScopeCell Biology

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