Biology & Life Sciences
CSE Citation Generator
Create accurate CSE references for journal articles, books, datasets and sequence records. Paste a DOI, PubMed ID, ISBN, URL, or title to get started.
Based on Scientific Style and Format, 9th edition
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CSE has three systems. This page builds name-year.
Name-year puts the year straight after the author and cites by author and year. Citation-sequence and citation-name both use a superscript number instead, and move the year after the journal name.
- Name-year
- (Watson and Crick 1953)
- Citation-sequence
- …was observed.1
CSE citation examples by source type
Shown in the name-year system: the year sits straight after the author, and journal names are abbreviated without full stops.
[1] Watson JD, Crick FHC. 1953. Molecular structure of nucleic acids: A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. Nature. 171(4356):737–738. doi:10.1038/171737a0
[2] Jinek M, Chylinski K, Fonfara I, Hauer M, Doudna JA, Charpentier E. 2012. A programmable dual-RNA-guided DNA endonuclease in adaptive bacterial immunity. Science. 337(6096):816–821. doi:10.1126/science.1225829
CSE names up to ten authors before switching to et al., which is far more generous than the medical styles.
[3] Author AA, Author BB. YYYY. Title of article. Journal Abbrev. 12(3):e0123456. doi:10.xxxx/xxxxx
Many life-science journals number articles rather than pages. Keep the number where the pages would go.
[4] Author AA, Author BB. YYYY. Title of preprint. bioRxiv. doi:10.1101/YYYY.MM.DD.NNNNNN. Preprint.
Books keep the place of publication, then the publisher, then the year, in that order.
[5] Kandel ER, Koester JD, Mack SH, Siegelbaum SA. 2021. Principles of neural science. 6th ed. New York: McGraw Hill.
[6] Editor AA, Editor BB, editors. YYYY. Title of book. 3rd ed. City (ST): Publisher.
CSE abbreviates the state or country in parentheses after the city: Cambridge (MA).
[7] Name of Organisation. YYYY. Title of book. City (ST): Publisher.
A chapter gives its own authors and title, then "In:", the editors, the book, and the page range.
[8] Author AA. YYYY. Title of chapter. In: Editor AA, Editor BB, editors. Title of book. City (ST): Publisher. p. 100–125.
[9] Author AA. YYYY. Title of chapter. In: Editor AA, editor. Title of book. Vol. 2. City (ST): Publisher. p. 100–125. (Series title; vol. 2).
[10] Author AA. YYYY. Title of entry. In: Title of reference work. 3rd ed. City (ST): Publisher. p. 45–47.
Online sources carry [Internet] after the title and a bracketed cited date, then "Available from:" and the URL.
[11] Name of Organisation. YYYY. Title of page [Internet]. City (ST): Publisher; [cited YYYY Mon DD]. Available from: https://example.com/page
[12] Name of Organisation. [date unknown]. Title of page [Internet]. City (ST): Publisher; [cited YYYY Mon DD]. Available from: https://example.com/page
[13] Name of Database [Internet]. YYYY. City (ST): Publisher; [cited YYYY Mon DD]. Available from: https://example.com/db
Sequence records and datasets are ordinary sources in the life sciences, and CSE cites them by accession number.
[14] Author AA. YYYY. Name of organism gene, complete cds. Bethesda (MD): National Center for Biotechnology Information; [cited YYYY Mon DD]. Accession No.: NM_123456. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NM_123456
[15] Author AA, Author BB. YYYY. Title of dataset. Repository Name. doi:10.xxxx/xxxxx
[16] Author AA. YYYY. Name of software. Version 2.1. City (ST): Publisher. Available from: https://example.com/software
A thesis carries a bracketed description of the degree, then the place and the awarding institution.
[17] Author AA. YYYY. Title of dissertation [dissertation]. City (ST): University Name.
[18] Author AA. YYYY. Title of thesis [master's thesis]. City (ST): University Name.
[19] Author AA. YYYY. Title of dissertation [dissertation on the Internet]. City (ST): University Name; [cited YYYY Mon DD]. Available from: https://example.com/thesis
Build your CSE bibliography
- [1] Vaswani A, Shazeer N, Parmar N, Uszkoreit J, Jones L, Gomez AN, Kaiser L, Polosukhin I. 2017. Attention is all you need. Proc. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 30:5998–6008.
- [2] He K, Zhang X, Ren S, Sun J. 2016. Deep residual learning for image recognition. Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit. :770–778. doi:10.1109/CVPR.2016.90
- [3] Jinek M, Chylinski K, Fonfara I, Hauer M, Doudna JA, Charpentier E. 2012. A programmable dual-RNA-guided DNA endonuclease in adaptive bacterial immunity. Science. 337(6096):816–821. doi:10.1126/science.1225829
- [4] Brown TB, Mann B, Ryder N, Subbiah M, Kaplan J, Dhariwal P, Neelakantan A. 2020. Language models are few-shot learners. Proc. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 33:1877–1901.
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- Style-aware sorting Ordered and numbered for your style.
CSE citation rules at a glance
- Three systems Citation-sequence, citation-name and name-year. Your journal or department picks one.
- In-text citations Author and year in name-year; a superscript number in the other two systems.
- Author names Surname then initials with no punctuation: Watson JD, Crick FHC.
- Up to ten authors CSE names ten before switching to et al., which is far more than the medical styles allow.
- Year before the volume Author, year, title, journal, volume: the year sits earlier than in the Vancouver family.
- Place with a state code Books give the city then the state or country in parentheses: Cambridge (MA).
Checked against the Based on Scientific Style and Format, 9th edition · Last reviewed August 2026
Read our methodologyCommon CSE citation mistakes
- Mixing two of the three systems A superscript number in one paragraph and an author-year parenthetical in the next is the most common CSE error.
- Using the Vancouver element order CSE puts the year immediately after the author, not after the journal name.
- Truncating the author list at six That is Vancouver. CSE names up to ten authors before et al.
- Leaving the state code off a city CSE writes Cambridge (MA), not Cambridge, because city names repeat across countries.
- Citing a sequence without its accession number A GenBank record is identified by accession number. Without it the citation points nowhere.
- Omitting [Internet] and the cited date Online sources carry both, plus "Available from:" before the URL.
CSE quick reference (one page, PDF)
The three systems side by side, element order for every source type, and the patterns for sequence records and datasets. Print it, or hand it to a lab group.
- Citation-sequence, citation-name and name-year compared
- Reference patterns for eight source types
- GenBank, dataset and software citation forms
- The ten-author rule, and where CSE differs from Vancouver
CSE citation generator FAQ
Is this CSE citation generator free?
Yes. Generate, copy, save, and export CSE citations without signing up. There is no paid tier and no export limit.
Which of the three CSE systems should I use?
This generator produces name-year, which puts the year after the author and cites by author and year. Citation-sequence numbers sources by first appearance and moves the year after the journal name; citation-name does the same but numbers an alphabetical list. Your journal or department chooses; if nobody has said, ask.
How many authors does CSE list before et al.?
Ten. With eleven or more, name the first ten and add et al. This is much more generous than Vancouver, which stops at six.
How do I cite a GenBank sequence?
By accession number, with the database as publisher and a cited date. The sequence and dataset tab has the pattern.
How is CSE different from Vancouver?
CSE puts the year straight after the author instead of after the journal name, names ten authors instead of six, and writes the place with a state code in parentheses.
Where does the citation metadata come from?
Crossref for DOIs, PubMed for biomedical articles, and Open Library for ISBNs. Nothing is written by a language model, so a volume or page range is either verified or left blank for you to fill in. See our methodology.
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