How to format your references using the Cancer Research citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Cancer Research. 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

Bohannon J. The Gonzonaut goes to Mars. Science. 2007;318:1719.

A journal article with 2 authors

Zijlstra AA, Davis RJ. Retrospective. Sir Bernard Lovell (1913-2012). Science. 2012;337:1307.

A journal article with 3 authors

Rohde DLT, Olson S, Chang JT. Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans. Nature. 2004;431:562–6.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Yamamoto K, Dürr UHN, Xu J, Im S-C, Waskell L, Ramamoorthy A. Dynamic interaction between membrane-bound full-length cytochrome P450 and cytochrome b5 observed by solid-state NMR spectroscopy. Sci Rep. 2013;3:2538.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Coles A, Hawkins DG. MIDAS Technical Analysis. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2011.

An edited book

Sun Y. Strain Effect in Semiconductors: Theory and Device Applications. First. Thompson SE, Nishida T, editors. Boston, MA: Springer US; 2010.

A chapter in an edited book

Agarwal B, Mittal N. Semantic Parsing Using Dependency Rules. In: Mittal N, editor. Prominent Feature Extraction for Sentiment Analysis. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2016. page 47–61.

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 Research.

Blog post

Davis J. Philae Wakes Up... Again! [Internet]. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2015 [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/space/philae-wakes-again/

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. Highway Infrastructure: Stakeholders’ Views on Time to Conduct Environmental Reviews of Highway Projects. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2003 May. Report No.: GAO-03-534.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Jensen ME. A comparison of school psychologists’ and school counselors’ ability to identify cognitive abilities underlying basic academic tasks [Doctoral dissertation]. [Minneapolis, MN]: Capella University; 2010.

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

Walsh MW, Goodnough A. Edging Toward Default. New York Times. 2011;B1.

In-text citations

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

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	Cancer Research
Abbreviation	Cancer Res.
ISSN (print)	0008-5472
ISSN (online)	1538-7445
Scope	Cancer Research Oncology