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

Corbyn Z (2014) Statistics: a growing global burden. Nature 510:S2-3

A journal article with 2 authors

Fujii N, Graybiel AM (2003) Representation of action sequence boundaries by macaque prefrontal cortical neurons. Science 301:1246–1249

A journal article with 3 authors

Morais-Cabral JH, Zhou Y, MacKinnon R (2001) Energetic optimization of ion conduction rate by the K+ selectivity filter. Nature 414:37–42

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Song K, Lee S-H, Kim K, et al (2014) Emission enhancement of sound emitters using an acoustic metamaterial cavity. Sci Rep 4:4165

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Samara T (2015) ERP and Information Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Gerbarg D (ed) (2009) Television Goes Digital. Springer, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Fouque J-P, Garnier J, Papanicolaou G, Sølna K (2007) Effective Properties of Randomly Layered Media. In: Garnier J, Papanicolaou G, Sølna K (eds) Wave Propagation and Time Reversal in Randomly Layered Media. Springer, New York, NY, pp 61–90

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 (2016) Stephen Hawking Has Another Message For The Rest Of Humanity. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/stephen-hawking-has-another-message-for-the-rest-of-humanity/. 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 (1971) Review of Selected Areas of Financial and Property Administration of Federal City College. 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

Dylla AG (2009) Synthesis, characterization and catalytic studies of bimetallic nanoparticles. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park

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

Grisham J (2017) John Grisham’s Suggestions for Writing Popular Fiction. New York Times BR31

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Corbyn 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Fujii and Graybiel 2003; Corbyn 2014).

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

Two authors: (Fujii and Graybiel 2003)
Three or more authors: (Song 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