4 Using the CSE Style For Your Citations

Introduction

The Council of Scientific Editors (CSE) Style

The Council of Scientific Editors (CSE) style is primarily used in the biological sciences,  and guides how both the End References (Bibliography) and the In-text References are formatted.

CSE format has three systems or versions of the style: Citation–Sequence, Citation–Name, and Name–Year.

The LIFE 121L class is using a modified version of the CSE Name-Year system.   In the official CSE styles, you would use the official abbreviation for the journal name in the citation – as shown in the examples. For this class, you should use the full name of the journal in your citations.

The purpose of this section is NOT to have you memorize the Council of Scientific Editors (CSE) style, (though it is frequently used in the biological sciences). Throughout your classes and your professional career, you will be asked to submit assignments, bibliographies and even articles formatted to match whatever style is  required. Even within the biological sciences, you will find one journal requires CSE Name-Year style, but then the next journal wants you to use APA style, and the third journal requires a style unique to the journal, described in their Instructions for Authors section.

The purpose of this section is to help you recognize the different elements of an article citation, so that you will be able to arrange those citation elements into the proper CSE style for your assignments, and in the future into whatever other style you are being asked to use.

You  have used the LIFE 120 CSE style in the past, so this section is also a review of the style as modified for this class and described in the LIFE 120/121L Library Guide. You will continue to use the CSE style examples in the Guide as your style manual.

Print versus Online Journals

In the CSE style, articles from print journals use a basic structure for their citations. Articles from online journals use the same basic structure with several extra elements added, indicating [Internet], the [date cited], and then an Available from: with the URL.

For this class, we are going to take a liberal view of “print” journals versus “online” journals so you will be able to use the basic structure for most of your citations.

“Print” Journals

Most of our journals started out as print (those bound volumes sitting on the library shelves), with a volume number, issue numbers and a range of pages for the article.  Though most of those same journals are now available as an ejournal, they are still organized like the original print journal, only in a digital form.  You may access the journal online but the citations still use the traditional pagination approach.  For these journal articles, whether they are in a physical print form or available online as an ejournal, you may use the simpler basic CSE structure (left column of the CSE Style guidelines in the LIFE 120/121L Library Guide.

“Online Only” Journals

New journal titles have emerged that are only available online, without a print equivalent. Some of these journals decided to abandon the traditional pagination system. In these cases, you may see a citation that doesn’t have beginning and ending page numbers, but has only has a single number – an Article Number.

Some articles will display a page range and an article number. Check the citation in the full text article or the database’s full record for the article (click on the title) to look for a traditional page range.

You also may find articles that have a range of page numbers but all of the articles in the volume begin with page 1.  In other words, the first article is listed with pages 1-6, the second article is on pages 1-8, the third article is on pages 1-5, etc.  The pagination represents the length of the article rather than where it is located within the published journal volume.

If you discover a citation that does not use  traditional pagination (a beginning page and an end page), i.e. has only a single Article Number, or if the page range numbers all begin with page 1, you will want to format the citation using the “Online only journal” style  (right hand column of the CSE Style guidelines of the LIFE 120/121L Library Guide).    It only requires the addition of a few elements to the basic structure:    [Internet],  [the date cited],  and Available from: the URL, internet address.  You can also add the DOI number if it is readily available.

The Elements of a CSE Style Citation

There are seven basic elements in a citation:   Author name(s), Year, Article title, Journal name, Volume,  Issue, and Page numbers (or article number).