How to format your references using the Journal of Cell Science citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Cell Science. 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
Selker, T. (2005). Voting technology. Election auditing is an end-to-end procedure. Science 308, 1873–1874.
A journal article with 2 authors
Shin, H. and Iwasaki, A. (2012). A vaccine strategy that protects against genital herpes by establishing local memory T cells. Nature 491, 463–467.
A journal article with 3 authors
Smith, M. A., Brandt, J. and Shadmehr, R. (2000). Motor disorder in Huntington’s disease begins as a dysfunction in error feedback control. Nature 403, 544–549.
A journal article with 11 or more authors
Pimenta, B. V. S., Haddad, C. F. B., Nascimento, L. B., Cruz, C. A. G. and Pombal, J. P., Jr (2005). Comment on “Status and trends of amphibian declines and extinctions worldwide.” Science 309, 1999; author reply 1999.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Sahinoglu, M. (2016). Cyber-Risk Informatics. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Marxer, W. ed. (2012). Direct Democracy and Minorities. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
A chapter in an edited book
Kakehi, K. and Matsuno, Y.-K. (2011). Capillary Electrophoresis and Its Microchip Format for the Analysis of Glycosaminoglycans. In Capillary Electrophoresis of Carbohydrates: From Monosaccharides to Complex Polysaccharides (ed. Volpi, N.), pp. 83–103. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press.

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 Science.

Blog post
Andrew, D. (2017). How To Talk To Your Dog – According To Science. IFLScience.

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 (1978). Procedures for Evaluating Research and Development Contracts in the Department of Transportation. Washington, DC: 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
Barrett, B. T. (2015). Modernizing Copyright for Equitable Treatment in the Streaming Age.

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
Murphy, M. J. O. (2015). A Look at Past Stories and Articles in The Times. New York Times C26.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Selker, 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Selker, 2005; Shin and Iwasaki, 2012).

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

  • Two authors: (Shin and Iwasaki, 2012)
  • Three or more authors: (Pimenta et al., 2005)

About the journal

Full journal titleJournal of Cell Science
AbbreviationJ. Cell Sci.
ISSN (print)0021-9533
ISSN (online)1477-9137
ScopeCell Biology

Other styles