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:

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.
Turk-Browne, N.B. (2013) Functional interactions as big data in the human brain. Science 342, 580–584
A journal article with 2 authors
1.
Corma, A. and Serna, P. (2006) Chemoselective hydrogenation of nitro compounds with supported gold catalysts. Science 313, 332–334
A journal article with 3 authors
1.
Lu, N. et al. (2013) Nearly constant electrical resistance over large temperature range in Cu3NMx (M = Cu, Ag, Au) compounds. Sci. Rep. 3, 3090
A journal article with 3 or more authors
1.
Winther-Jensen, B. et al. (2008) High rates of oxygen reduction over a vapor phase-polymerized PEDOT electrode. Science 321, 671–674

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
1.
Mitra, A. (2008) Fundamentals of Quality Control and Improvement, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
1.
Landoni, G. et al., eds. (2014) Reducing Mortality in the Perioperative Period, Springer International Publishing
A chapter in an edited book
1.
Schnidman, E.A. and MacMillan, W.D. (2016) Centralization: The Rise of Technocracy. In How the Fed Moves Markets: Central Bank Analysis for the Modern Era (MacMillan, W. D., ed), pp. 31–38, Palgrave Macmillan US

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
1.
Evans, K. (2016) World’s First Solar And Seawater-Powered Farm Opens In Australia. IFLScience. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/technology/worlds-first-solar-and-seawaterpowered-farm-opens-in-australia/. [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
1.
Government Accountability Office (1979) Comments on Report Entitled “The Federal Program To Strengthen Developing Institutions of Higher Education Lacks Direction,” 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
1.
Berbery, M.L. (2010) Predictors of White adoptive parents’ cultural and racial socialization behaviors with their Asian adopted children. 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
1.
Castle, S. and Erlanger, S. (2017) British Premier Outlines Path to a Clean Break With the E.UNew York Times, A1

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 titleTrends in Cell Biology
AbbreviationTrends Cell Biol.
ISSN (print)0962-8924
ISSN (online)1879-3088
ScopeCell Biology

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