About
About CSE Citation Generator
Free, accurate CSE references for anyone writing in the sciences. No accounts, no ads, no paywalled “premium” formats.
Why we built it
CSE style is used across biology, medicine, and the life sciences, yet most citation tools treat it as an afterthought. They mix up the three CSE systems, miss journal abbreviations, and still produce 8th-edition output years after the rules changed.
We built csecitation.com to do one style properly. Every reference follows the 9th edition of Scientific Style and Format: The CSE Manual (2024), in all three systems: name–year, citation–sequence, and citation–name.
What you can do here
- CSE citation generator: Build a full reference list from DOIs, PubMed IDs, ISBNs, URLs, or manual entry.
- In-text citation generator: Get the correct in-text form for name–year, citation–sequence, or citation–name.
- Journal abbreviation finder: Look up the official NLM/ISO 4 abbreviation CSE references require.
- Title sentence-case converter: Convert titles to CSE sentence case while keeping acronyms and species names intact.
Alongside the tools, the CSE citation guide and reference examples explain the rules behind every reference, so you can check our output and learn the style yourself.
How we keep it accurate
Source details come from the registries publishers use themselves: Crossref and DataCite for DOIs, PubMed for biomedical literature, and Open Library and Google Books for ISBNs. Journal abbreviations follow the NLM Catalog and ISO 4. Our formatting rules are covered by automated tests for every source type and system.
No tool is perfect. Metadata from publishers is sometimes incomplete or wrong, so always give your reference list a final check against your instructor’s or journal’s requirements.
Our principles
- Free, with no sign-up. Every feature is available to everyone.
- Private by default. Your references are stored in your own browser, not on our servers. See our privacy policy.
- Independent. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by the Council of Science Editors.
Get in touch
Found a formatting error, or want a source type we don’t support yet? We read every message. Contact us.