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CSE style comes from Scientific Style and Format, published by the Council of Science Editors, and is the standard in biology and the natural sciences. Like ACS it offers more than one system — three, in fact — and unlike ACS the choice changes the reference list itself, not just the in-text marker.
Citation-sequence numbers sources in the order you first cite them, and the reference list follows that order. Citation-name alphabetizes the reference list first and then numbers it, so reference 1 is whichever source comes first alphabetically. Name-year drops numbers altogether and uses (Smith 2023) with an alphabetized list, like APA.
The three produce genuinely different documents, so decide before you start writing. CiteCreate outputs the citation-sequence form, which is the most commonly assigned in undergraduate biology courses; if your course wants name-year, the fields are the same and only the ordering and the in-text marker change.
CSE names look compressed compared with other styles, and deliberately so: the surname is followed by initials with no punctuation and no spaces — Smith JA, not Smith, J. A. The article title is sentence case and unitalicized, and the journal name is abbreviated. Volume, issue, and pages run together with no spaces at all.
Example
1. Smith JA. The role of machine learning in academic writing. Journal of Educational Technology. 2023;41(3):215–232. https://doi.org/10.1234/jet.2023.0041
In-text: 1
A book entry keeps the same compressed name format, gives the edition, and separates the publisher from the year with a semicolon. Book and journal titles are not italicized in CSE — a difference from nearly every other style on this site.
Example
1. Smith JA. The craft of research. 4th ed. University of Chicago Press; 2020.
In-text: 1
In citation-sequence and citation-name, the in-text citation is the reference number as a superscript¹ or in parentheses (1) — your instructor or journal picks which, and you apply the superscript formatting yourself in your word processor.
In name-year the in-text citation is (Smith 2023) with no comma between name and year, which is the single detail that most often gets copied wrong from APA. Two authors are (Smith and Doe 2023); three or more are (Smith et al. 2023).
Nearly all CSE errors come from importing habits out of APA, which looks superficially similar and punctuates almost nothing the same way.
Check your course or journal requirements. Citation-sequence and citation-name are numbered systems; name-year is author-date. They cannot be mixed, and the choice determines how your reference list is ordered.
That is the CSE convention: Smith JA, with no comma after the surname, no periods after the initials, and no space between them. It is one of the clearest signals that a reference list really is in CSE and not APA.
No. CSE does not italicize journal, book, or article titles. If your reference list has italics in it, it is probably following APA or Chicago rather than CSE.
Scientific Style and Format lists up to ten authors before truncating with et al. Some journals set a lower limit, so check the target journal's instructions before submitting.
Yes. CSE references, BibTeX, and RIS export are free with no sign-up required.