How to format your references using the Journal of Cell Communication and Signaling citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Cell Communication and Signaling. 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

Jernelöv A (2010) How to defend against future oil spills. Nature 466:182–183

A journal article with 2 authors

Sneden C, Cowan JJ (2003) Genesis of the heaviest elements in the Milky Way Galaxy. Science 299:70–75

A journal article with 3 authors

Jenkins N, Saam JR, Mango SE (2006) CYK-4/GAP provides a localized cue to initiate anteroposterior polarity upon fertilization. Science 313:1298–1301

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Mejía-León ME, Petrosino JF, Ajami NJ, et al (2014) Fecal microbiota imbalance in Mexican children with type 1 diabetes. Sci Rep 4:3814

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Raju KSN (2011) Fluid Mechanics, Heat Transfer, and Mass Transfer. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Vlamos P, Alexiou A (eds) (2015) GeNeDis 2014: Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Tytler R, Hubber P, Prain V (2013) Structuring Learning Sequences. In: Tytler R, Prain V, Hubber P, Waldrip B (eds) Constructing Representations to Learn in Science. SensePublishers, Rotterdam, pp 51–65

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 Journal of Cell Communication and Signaling.

Blog post

Hale T (2017) The Science Behind Why This Photograph Looks Fake. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/the-science-behind-why-this-photograph-looks-fake/. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (1999) Year 2000 Computing Crisis: FAA Is Making Progress But Important Challenges Remain. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Sanute PJ (2012) What power? A mixed methods study of nonformal education teacher perceptions of social power. Doctoral dissertation, Capella University

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

Saslow L (2008) Bond Issue Is Approved for Sachem Schools. New York Times LI2

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Jernelöv 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Sneden and Cowan 2003; Jernelöv 2010).

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

Two authors: (Sneden and Cowan 2003)
Three or more authors: (Mejía-León et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Cell Communication and Signaling
Abbreviation	J. Cell Commun. Signal.
ISSN (print)	1873-9601
ISSN (online)	1873-961X
Scope	Biochemistry Cell Biology Molecular Biology