CSE Citation Generator

Free CSE name-year citation generator. Paste a DOI, ISBN, URL, or reference and copy a CSE reference with the matching in-text citation. No sign-up.

CSE Citation Generator

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Each source is checked against its published record, formatted in CSE Style (Name-Year), and kept in this browser. No sign-up.

CSE citation examples

The same two sources appear on every CiteTools generator page, so you can compare styles side by side.

Journal article

LeCun Y, Bengio Y, Hinton G. 2015. Deep learning. Nature. 521(7553):436–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539

Book

Kahneman D. 2011. Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

CSE in-text citations

Parenthetical: (LeCun et al. 2015)
Narrative: LeCun et al. (2015)
With a page number: (LeCun et al. 2015: 438)

How CSE name-year formats a reference

Every author is a surname and initials with no periods, and commas separate the names: LeCun Y, Bengio Y, Hinton G.
The year follows the authors, so the reference list reads as author and year and runs in alphabetical order: Kahneman D. 2011.
Titles use sentence case with no quotation marks, and the word after a colon stays in lower case.
The journal name is abbreviated without periods, and volume, issue, and pages run together after it: Nature. 521(7553):436–444.
A DOI closes the reference as an https://doi.org address with no period after it. A book gives its title, its publisher, and no city.
A reference lists up to five authors. A work with six or more shows the first author followed by et al.

Who uses CSE style

CSE style comes from The CSE Manual: Scientific Style and Format, now in its 9th edition, published by the Council of Science Editors. Courses and journals in biology, botany, zoology, geology, and the other natural sciences ask for it. The manual offers three systems: citation-sequence, citation-name, and name-year. CiteTools writes the name-year system, which names the author and the year in the text and lists the references alphabetically. The in-text citation is the surname and the year in parentheses. Two authors are joined by and, and three or more become the first author and et al. Check which system your course names before you copy a reference, because the other two systems number the sources instead.

Frequently asked questions

What does a CSE name-year citation look like in the text?

The surname and the year go in parentheses, as in (LeCun et al. 2015). With a page, CiteTools writes (LeCun et al. 2015: 438), where some library guides write (LeCun et al. 2015, p 438). The manual shows et al without a period, and the style file CiteTools reads prints it with one.

What goes into a CSE reference to a web page?

The author, the date with its month and day, the title, the publisher, and the address. A page with no date gets [date unknown] and the date you read it in brackets.

Should the journal name be abbreviated?

Yes. CSE abbreviates journal titles by the List of Title Word Abbreviations of the ISSN, without periods: N Engl J Med. CiteTools prints the abbreviation that the record or its journal list holds. When it holds none, the reference carries the full name, so abbreviate it by hand.

CSE Citation Generator