How to format your references using the Trends in Cell Biology citation style

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

Herschbach, D. (2000) Kent R. Wilson (1937-2000). Nature 405, 902

A journal article with 2 authors

Khoury, M.J. and Ioannidis, J.P.A. (2014) Medicine. Big data meets public health. Science 346, 1054–1055

A journal article with 3 authors

Alle, H. et al. (2009) Energy-efficient action potentials in hippocampal mossy fibers. Science 325, 1405–1408

A journal article with 3 or more authors

Dunne, L. et al. (2003) Type II supernovae as a significant source of interstellar dust. Nature 424, 285–287

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Harper, C. (2005) Analytic Methods in Physics, Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA

An edited book

Friedman, Y. (2005) Physical Applications of Homogeneous Balls, ((1st edn) ), 40, Birkhäuser

A chapter in an edited book

Fuangkhon, P. and Tanprasert, T. (2012) Multi-class Contour Preserving Classification. In Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning - IDEAL 2012: 13th International Conference, Natal, Brazil, August 29-31, 2012. Proceedings (Yin, H. et al., eds), pp. 35–42, Springer

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 Trends in Cell Biology.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J. (2015) New Super-Hubble Telescope Could Find out if we are Alone in the Universe. IFLScience. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/space/super-hubble-telescope-could-find-out-if-we-are-alone-universe/. [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 (1980) Opinion on the Legality of the Scheduled Transfer of Administrative Responsibility for Certain Law Enforcement Education Programs, 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

Grasis, J.A. (2008) Controlling T lymphocyte activation with a molecular rheostat. Doctoral dissertation, University of California San Diego

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

Detrick, B. (2017) Et AlNew York Times, D6

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 title	Trends in Cell Biology
Abbreviation	Trends Cell Biol.
ISSN (print)	0962-8924
ISSN (online)	1879-3088
Scope	Cell Biology