CSE Citation Generator
A CSE citation generator formats references in the Council of Science Editors style — this tool uses CSE's name-year system, where in-text citations show the author's surname and year in parentheses instead of a number. It's the standard citation format in biology, ecology, and other life-sciences coursework. Search by title, DOI, ISBN, or URL, confirm the match, and get a reference-list entry plus its name-year in-text example.
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This CSE citation generator formats references in the Council of Science Editors' style manual, standard across biology, ecology, and life-sciences coursework and journals. CSE actually defines three citation systems — citation-sequence, citation-name, and name-year — and this CSE citation generator uses name-year, the most widely assigned version in undergraduate biology courses, where a source is cited in the text as "(Author Year)" rather than a number. Run a journal article, a book, or a website through this CSE citation generator and each comes back in the same name-year format.
This CSE citation generator builds the reference-list entry and the parenthetical name-year in-text citation directly from the Council of Science Editors' own formatting rules, encoded in the open Citation Style Language (CSL) that Zotero also uses. Search by title, DOI, ISBN, or URL and this CSE citation generator pulls in a source automatically; confirm it's the right one, or type the details in by hand and the CSE citation generator still returns the same correctly ordered result.
Who uses CSE style
CSE style is the standard citation format in biology, ecology, environmental science, and related life-sciences coursework and journals in the US. If a lab report or biology course syllabus specifies "CSE style" or "Council of Science Editors," a CSE citation generator keeps the name-year order consistent across every entry in a long reference list.
How to cite a journal article in CSE (name-year)
This CSE citation generator puts the year right after the author list, before the title:
Watson JD, Crick FHC. 1953. Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. Nature. 171(4356):737–738. https://doi.org/10.1038/171737a0
The in-text citation names the author and year: the double-helix model was proposed by (Watson and Crick 1953).
How to cite a book in CSE (name-year)
This CSE citation generator follows the same author-year-title order for books, with the publisher at the end:
Cormen TH, Leiserson CE, Rivest RL, Stein C. 2009. Introduction to Algorithms. 3rd ed. MIT Press.
In-text: (Cormen et al. 2009)
How to cite a website in CSE (name-year)
CSE's own webpage format is narrower than its journal-article and book formats — it cites the organization or site name, the year, and the access date, but not the individual page title, so this CSE citation generator matches that rule rather than inventing a title field the style doesn't use. The date below is this example's write-up date — the live tool always stamps the date you actually run it:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2024. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; [accessed 2026 Aug 12]. https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/basics/index.html
If the page title matters for your reader, name it in the surrounding sentence instead of relying on the reference-list entry to carry it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does CSE style use numbers or author-year in-text citations?
What's the difference between CSE's citation-sequence and name-year systems?
Why doesn't the website example include a page title?
Can I generate a CSE citation from just a DOI or a URL?
Is my search or text sent to Akmon's servers?
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