How to format your references using the Cancer Cell citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Cancer Cell. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Gläser, R. (2015). Catalysis: The complexity of intimacy. Nature 528, 197–198.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kemp, C., and Regier, T. (2012). Kinship categories across languages reflect general communicative principles. Science 336, 1049–1054.

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang, P., Cohen, R.E., and Haule, K. (2015). Effects of electron correlations on transport properties of iron at Earth’s core conditions. Nature 517, 605–607.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Nowak, J.K., Grzybowska-Chlebowczyk, U., Landowski, P., Szaflarska-Poplawska, A., Klincewicz, B., Adamczak, D., Banasiewicz, T., Plawski, A., and Walkowiak, J. (2014). Prevalence and correlates of vitamin K deficiency in children with inflammatory bowel disease. Sci. Rep. 4, 4768.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

O’Connor, K., and Aardema, F. (2011). Clinician’s Handbook for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd).

An edited book

Hayat, M.A. ed. (2012). Stem Cells and Cancer Stem Cells,Volume 3: Stem Cells and Cancer Stem Cells, Therapeutic Applications in Disease and Injury: Volume 3 (Springer Netherlands).

A chapter in an edited book

Falke, S., and Kapur, D. (2006). Inductive Decidability Using Implicit Induction. In Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Reasoning: 13th International Conference, LPAR 2006, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, November 13-17, 2006. Proceedings Lecture Notes in Computer Science., M. Hermann and A. Voronkov, eds. (Springer), pp. 45–59.

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 Cancer Cell.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). This Exoskeleton Allows Paralyzed People To Walk. 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 (1995). Federal Research: Information on Fees for Selected Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (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

Pappenfus, B.J. (2013). How frequency of change within organizations affects burnout of human resource professionals.

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

Wilson, M. (2017). Diary Hints at Slaves’ Remains on a Lot in Brooklyn. New York Times, A15.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

This sentence cites one reference ².
This sentence cites two references ^2,4.
This sentence cites four references ^2,4,6,8.

About the journal

Full journal title	Cancer Cell
Abbreviation	Cancer Cell
ISSN (print)	1535-6108
ISSN (online)	1878-3686
Scope	Cancer Research Cell Biology Oncology