CSE Format
1. What is the CSE format?
The principles of this style were formed by the Council of Biology Editors in the 1960s, but in 2000, the institution was transformed into the Council of Scientific Editors. From then on, the formatting style has been called CSE. As a rule, the CSE style is used in medical sciences. As CSE-format papers are as a rule submitted to scientific journals, there are no standard requirements for the font, indentations, etc. of a paper.
2. The CSE citation style
There are no strict rules for the CSE writing format, however there are some recommendations and a specific CSE citation guide.
- The text should be aligned with the left margin, with no additional spaces.
- The author’s name should be inverted, which means that the last name is given first, with the initials after. If the citation-sequence system is used, the initials should be given with no commas, periods, or spaces between them. However, in the name-year system, the initials are given after the last name and a comma, and with a period and a space between them.
- If there are less than 10 authors of a source, all of them should be listed, and if there are more than 10 authors, the credits are given to the first 10, and then a comma and “et al.” should be added.
- Titles of books and articles are not underlined, italicized, made bold, or enclosed in quotation marks. All the words (except for the first one and the proper names) in the titles should be lowercase.
- The names of journals and magazines in the CSE format are given as abbreviations—all of them being capitalized. For example, J Biol Sci is an accepted abbreviation for Journal of Biological Sciences.
- If the URL is given as the last element about the entry, there should be no period after it.
There are 3 systems of creating a CSE citation.
2.1 The citation-sequence system gives guidelines for both in-text citation and references. For citations in the main body of the paper, superscripted numbers are put above the cited pieces of text, and all the numbers are mentioned in the bibliography, starting from 1, independent of the alphabetical order.
Here is an example of the CSE bibliography format. The number of elements in one entry depends on the type of the source:
CSE book citation: Hawking SW. Title. Edition. City of publication: Publisher; 2018.
Book with 2-10 authors: Hawking SW, Einstein A. Title. Edition. City of publication: Publisher; 2018.
Chapter of a book: Hawking SW. Title of chapter. In: editor name, editor. Title of the book. Edition. City of publication: Publisher, 2018. Page(s)
Electronic book: Hawking SW. Title. Edition. City of publication: Publisher; 2018. Page(s). Available from: URL (DOI is preferable)
Article from a journal: Hawking SW. Title of the article. Abbreviated title of the journal. 2018; volume/issue: page(s).
Electronic article from a database: Hawking SW. Title of the article. Abbreviated title of the journal. 2018; volume/issue: page(s). Available from: URL (DOI is preferable)
CSE website citation: Hawking SW. Title of the webpage. City of publication: Publisher; 2018. Available from: URL (DOI is preferable)
Online video: Hawking SW. Title of the video. Edition (if any). City of publication (if any): Publisher; 2018. Available from: URL (DOI is preferable)
2.2 Citation-name system guidelines on in-text citing coincide with the instructions of the previously stated system. The superscripted numbers are put above the citation for in-text references, but in the reference list, the works mentioned are listed alphabetically. When the list is completed, the entries are assigned numbers starting from 1 for the first entry according to the alphabet.
The order of informational elements in source entries is the same as in the citation-sequence formatting system.
2.3 Name-year system: in the text, the references are cited using the last name of the author and the year of publication, which are enclosed in parentheses, without commas between the elements (Lastname 2018). The sources are listed in the bibliography alphabetically—the last name of the author is the first element of each entry.
These are some examples of the CSE formatting of different media using the name-year system:
Book: Hawking, S. W. 2018. Title. Edition. City of publication: Publisher.
Chapter of a book: Hawking, S. W. 2018. Title of chapter. In: editor(s) name, editor(s). Title of the book. Edition. City of publication: Page(s)
Electronic book: Hawking, S. W. 2018. Title [Internet]. Edition. City of publication: Publisher. Page(s). Available from: URL (DOI is preferable)
Article from a journal: Hawking, S. W. 2018. Title of the article. Abbreviated title of the journal. Volume/issue: page(s).
Electronic article from a database: Hawking, S. W. 2018. Title of the article. Abbreviated title of the journal. Volume/issue: page(s). Available from: URL (DOI is preferable)
Website: Hawking, S. W. 2018. Title of the webpage. City of publication: Publisher. Available from: URL (DOI is preferable)
Online video: Hawking, S. W. 2018. Title of the video. Edition. City of publication: Publisher. Available from: URL (DOI is preferable)
If there is no author available for a work, the name-year system of the CSE format citation guide allows putting the title of the work cited at the beginning of an entry.