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CSE Quick Citation Guide

This guide contains some examples of common citation formats in CSE Style (Council of Science Editors, formerly called the CBE Council of Biology Editors).

C-S and C-N System: Articles

Important Elements:

  • Author (last name, initials only for first & middle names.  List all names for up to 5 authors, if more than 5 list the first author and then “et al”
  • Title of article (capitalize only the first word of title and subtitle, and proper nouns)
  • Title of publication abbreviated (if possible use abbreviations maintained by the ISSN International Centre https://www.issn.org/services/online-services/access-to-the-ltwa/)
  • Date of publication of article (year only for scholarly journals; year and month for magazines; year, month and day for daily or newspapers publications)
  • Volume and issue number
  • Page numbers of article (for journals that follow continuous publication model, the article number)
  • For journals consulted online, include URL (DOI is preferred)

The basic format would be:

Last Name Initials[period] Article title[period] Abbreviated Journal Title[period] Date[semi-colon]volume(issue)[colon]1st page number[hyphen]last page number.

Online Material

The basic rules for citing do not differ for internet items from what is required for print.  Simply listing a URL is not sufficient.

  • All the publication information should also be listed as in the examples below
  • Use Access Date only if there is no publication, copyright, or modification date
  • Add URL at the end (DOI preferred)

Examples

Online Scholarly Article

Savage E, Ramsay M, White J, Beard S, Lawson H, Hunjan R, Brown D. Mumps outbreaks across England and Wales in 2004: observational study. BMJ. 2005;330(7500):1119-1120. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.330.7500.119

Article in a scholarly journal

Cox J, Engstrom RT. Influence of the spatial pattern of conserved lands on the persistence of a large population of red-cockaded woodpeckers. Biol Conserv. 2001;100(1):137-150.

Article in Conference Proceedings

He K, Zhang X, Ren S, Sun J. Deep residual learning for image recognition. In: Proceedings of the 29th IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR); 2016 Jun 26 - Jul 1; Las Vegas, NV, United States. IEEE Computer Society; 2019. p 770-778. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2016.90

Technical Report

Page E, Harney JM. Health hazard evaluation report. National Institution of Occupational Safety and Health; 2001. Report No.: HETA2000-0139-2824. https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/hhe/reports/pdfs/2000-0139-2824.pdf

Article in a daily newspaper

Yoon CK. DNA clues improve outlook for red wolf. The New York Times (New York Ed). 2000 Dec 26;Sect F:10.

Article in a daily newspaper consulted online

Zimmer C. To speed vaccination, some call for delaying second shots. The New York Times. 2021 Apr 9 [updated 2021 Apr 27]. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/health/covid-vaccine-second-dose-delay.html