CSE Citation Generator

Paste one thing into the search box and the CSE citation generator works out what it is before looking it up.

CSE citation machine lookups: DOIs, ISBNs, links and titles

• A DOI (it starts with 10.) is looked up at doi.org, with Crossref as a backup. It is the best route for articles you found in PubMed, BIOSIS or a journal site; the DOI is on the first page of the paper.
• An ISBN is looked up in Open Library, then Google Books.
• A web address is read for the page's own title, author, date and site name. If the page carries a DOI, the DOI record is used instead.
• A title is searched in Crossref and Open Library, and up to eight matches come back, closest first.

Every result says how sure it is

The CSE citation machine never invents a missing detail. A result is marked Source details matched, Details need review or Entered by you, and missing fields are highlighted. Select Try it with an example to load Watson and Crick's 1953 Nature paper on DNA.

The CSE Manual gives three ways to cite, and they share one reference format with small changes. The CSE citation generator puts all three in a toggle above the search box. Pick one, and the preview, your saved list and the Word download all switch with it.

Citation-sequence

Sources get superscript numbers in the order you first cite them, and the References list follows that order. It is the system the CSE citation generator opens with.

Name-year

You cite the author and year in parentheses, such as (Darwin 1859), and the References list is alphabetical with no numbers. The year moves to just after the authors. Use it when your instructor wants readers to see who did the work without flipping to the list.

Citation-name

The list is alphabetical, as in name-year, but numbered, and the numbers in your text come from that alphabetical list. If Carson is first alphabetically, Carson is 1 wherever you cite it, even if Watson and Crick come first in your introduction. The CSE citation generator's note for this system says so.

Which CSE citation style should you choose?

Use whatever your syllabus or lab manual names. If it just says "CSE," ask; as the Duke University Libraries CSE guide explains, citation-sequence and citation-name are nearly identical apart from how the list is ordered, while name-year works differently.

CSE references are compact: no periods in initials, no italics, and the date, volume, issue and pages run together. Each part below comes from the Watson and Crick reference the CSE citation generator produced in citation-sequence.

CSE style citation for books and reports

Books follow the same pattern with the publisher and year after the title: Darwin C. On the origin of species by means of natural selection. John Murray; 1859. Reports put the agency first and the issuing department as publisher. In name-year, the year moves up behind the authors: Darwin C. 1859. On the origin…

Citation in CSE format: the References list

The list goes at the end under the heading References. In citation-sequence it is in citation order; in name-year and citation-name it is alphabetical by first author. The Word file uses 1.15 line spacing.

Every CSE in-text citation points to one entry in your References list. Its form depends on the system in the toggle.

CSE in-text citation with numbers

In citation-sequence and citation-name, put a superscript number right after the fact or the author's name, such as "the double helix was proposed in 1953.¹" Reuse a source's number each time you cite it, and separate several numbers with commas, such as ¹,³. The In-text tab previews one source at a time, so it always shows 1; use the number beside the entry in My reference list.

CSE in-text citation in name-year

In name-year, the In-text tab gives (Watson and Crick 1953), and the Narrative tab gives Watson and Crick (1953) for when the names are part of your sentence. For three or more authors it shortens to the first author and et al., as in (Jinek et al. 2012). To cite two sources at once, join them with a semicolon yourself: (Darwin 1859; Carson 1962).

Each source type has its own form in the CSE style citation generator, with only the fields that type needs. Here is what to check in each.

Journal articles and abbreviations

Paste the DOI. CSE abbreviates multi-word journal titles with no periods, such as J Biol Chem or Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, while one-word titles such as Nature, Science and Genetics stay whole. The CSE citation generator prints whatever is in the Journal name box, so type the abbreviation there. The NLM Catalog lists standard abbreviations.

Sentence case for titles

CSE capitalizes only the first word and proper nouns in article and book titles. The CSE style citation generator prints titles exactly as you enter them, and database records often use title case, so retype them: Silent spring, not Silent Spring.

Books, chapters and reports

Paste the ISBN and check the authors, publisher and year. For a chapter, choose Book chapter. For CDC, NIH or USDA reports, choose Report under More.

CSE name-year citation generator: check organization web pages

In name-year only, a web page whose author is an organization can lose its page title. The CSE name-year citation generator then gives the organization, the site and the access date with no title. When you cite a page from NIH, the CDC or a museum in name-year, compare the entry with the page and type the title back in after you copy or download it. Citation-sequence and citation-name keep the title.

The CSE Manual: Scientific Style and Format for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, 9th edition, was published in 2024 by the Council of Science Editors. It is a standard style guide in the life and natural sciences, and US biology departments use it for lab reports, research papers and theses.

What this CSE citation generator uses

References are formatted with the Citation Style Language project's three CSE 9th edition style files, one per system. They give surnames with unpunctuated initials, sentence case as entered, no city for books, and the first author plus et al. for long author lists.

Who uses CSE citation style in the US

You will meet CSE in biology, ecology, microbiology, botany and zoology courses, and in some environmental science programs. Chemistry departments more often use ACS, and nursing and pre-med courses AMA or APA, so check the syllabus. The ACS Citation Generator, the AMA Citation Generator and the APA Citation Machine work the same way.

Every source you add goes into a saved list, and the CSE citation maker formats that list in whichever system the toggle shows.

How each system orders your list

In citation-sequence, the list is numbered in the order you add sources, so add each one when you first cite it. If you later cite a new source earlier, remove the sources that should follow it and add them again. In name-year and citation-name, the list sorts itself alphabetically and renumbers as you go.

Saved lists in your browser

Keep a list per assignment, such as "BIOL 2100 enzyme lab". Each list holds up to 300 sources, and the tool tells you if a source is already on the list. Lists are saved in your browser's local storage on this device. They don't follow you to another computer, and clearing browser data deletes them.

Download formats

• Download for Word gives a .docx file headed References, in Times New Roman 12 pt with 1.15 line spacing and a hanging indent.
• Copy all copies the whole list, ready for Word or Google Docs.
• More formats gives plain text, RIS (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote) and BibTeX (LaTeX, Overleaf).

The Alphabetizer is handy for sorting a pasted list by hand.

Here is the same 1953 article in the CSE citation format and in two other numbered styles, all from this site's generators.

CSE and AMA look alike. The giveaways are AMA's italic journal title, its hyphen in page ranges (737-738) and its doi: prefix. AMA also lists three authors and et al. for seven or more, where CSE gives the first author and et al. above five. ACS adds periods to initials and semicolons between authors. Every style is on the citation machines page.

Most errors in the CSE citation format come from APA or MLA habits.

Check your length with the Word Counter, which can leave the References list out of the count. If your instructor wants an APA-style cover page, the APA Title Page Generator lays one out; this tool doesn't format title pages.

The CSE citation generator is free, with no account and a fair-use cap of 60 lookups every 10 minutes. Here is where your information goes.

• Lookups: what you type in the search box goes to our server, which asks doi.org, then Crossref, for DOIs; Open Library, then Google Books, for ISBNs; Crossref and Open Library for titles; or the public page you linked, for URLs. Results are cached for up to six hours.
• Formatting: source details are sent to our server, formatted, and sent back. They are not stored.
• Your lists: saved lists are stored only in your browser's local storage. When a list is formatted, its sources' details are sent to our server and back, and not stored.

References in this CSE citation generator are formatted by citeproc-js, the open-source citation processor used by Zotero and Mendeley, with the Citation Style Language project's three CSE 9th edition style files. Those files are maintained by Zotero and CSL volunteers; they are not published by the Council of Science Editors. The same engine powers the Vancouver Citation Generator and the IEEE Citation Generator.