Molcell Citation

Reference Style (molcell-citation)

When to trigger

• References are author–date "(Smith et al., 2021)" and must become Cell Press numbered.
• The reference list is alphabetical instead of ordered by first appearance.
• Author lists are truncated with "et al." in the bibliography.
• You are porting a manuscript from a name–year journal (or an older Cell Press template) to Molecular Cell.

Cell Press numbered citation mechanics (current)

Cell Press moved its journals — including Molecular Cell — to a numbered referencing style. Confirm the live format, but the working model is:

• In-text: superscript numbers, assigned in order of first appearance (e.g., "…unwinds DNA.^1,2" and later "…as shown previously.^1").
• Reference list: numbered in citation order — NOT alphabetical, NOT author–date.
• Full author lists in each entry (Cell Press does not truncate to "et al." for typical author counts; confirm the cutoff).
• Abbreviated journal names, with year in parentheses, volume, and pages/article number.
• A single reference list covering the main text and STAR Methods.
• Reuse the same number on every later citation of a source; never assign a source two numbers.

This is the opposite of the old Cell Press author–date convention and of journals like Genetics that stay name–year. Porting in from an author–date manuscript is a mechanical but error-prone renumbering — do it in one pass so the in-text superscripts and the list stay in sync.

Reference formats (shape — confirm against the live Cell Press style)

• Journal article: Author, A.B., Author, C.D., and Author, E.F. (2021). Title of the article. Abbrev. Journal Name 152, 1173–1183.
• Book: Author, A.B. (2020). Book Title, edition (Publisher).
• Chapter: Author, A.B. (2020). Chapter title. In Book Title, C.D. Editor, ed. (Publisher), pp. xx–yy.
• Dataset/structure/code: cite with repository, accession/DOI, and year (consistent with molcell-data).
• Preprint: include the server (e.g., bioRxiv) and DOI.

Surname precedes initials; "and" before the final author; year in parentheses after the author list. The entry is preceded by its number in the list.

Common conversion fixes (author–date → Cell Press numbered)

Worked conversion (author–date → Cell Press numbered)

An author–date sentence and its list entry:

Loss of XYZ slows fork progression (Smith et al., 2021). Smith, A.B., Lee, C.D., and Wong, E.F. (2021). Title. Mol. Cell 81, 233–247.

Converted to the current Cell Press numbered style, the in-text token becomes a superscript number set by where the source first appears, and the entry keeps full authors but is placed at that number in the citation-ordered list:

Loss of XYZ slows fork progression.^7 7. Smith, A.B., Lee, C.D., and Wong, E.F. (2021). Title. Mol. Cell 81, 233–247.

Mechanical traps: the number is fixed the first time the source appears and reused thereafter (do not renumber on later mentions); a source deleted from the text must be removed and everything after it renumbered; and a narrative citation keeps the author name in the sentence but still carries the superscript number.

STAR Methods and the single list

Molecular Cell uses one continuously numbered reference list for the whole paper, including citations that appear only in STAR Methods (protocols, algorithms, prior reagents). Do not build a separate methods bibliography. When porting from a journal that footnotes methods, sweep the STAR Methods text for citations and confirm each has a number in the single list. Software and datasets cited in the Key Resources Table follow molcell-data conventions (repository, accession/DOI, version) rather than the journal-article shape.

Tooling

• Use Zotero/EndNote with the current Molecular Cell / Cell Press CSL/style (numbered, citation-order); do a final manual pass on author-list completeness and journal-abbreviation form.
• After any text edit that adds or removes a citation, re-run the citation manager so numbers re-sequence — hand-numbering drifts fast.
• Verify every superscript resolves to exactly one list entry and that no list entry is uncited.

Output format

【Style detected】 author–date / alphabetical / other → Cell Press numbered
【In-text】 superscript numbers in order of appearance? yes/no
【List order】 numbered by first appearance (not alphabetical)? yes/no
【Author lists】 full (not et al.)? surname-first? journal abbreviated? yes/no
【Reuse】 each source one number, reused on later cites? yes/no
【Unresolved / uncited】 [...]
【Next】 molcell-submission

Anti-patterns

• Do not leave author–date "(Smith et al., 2021)" tokens in a Molecular Cell manuscript.
• Do not order the reference list alphabetically — Cell Press numbered is by appearance.
• Do not give one source two different numbers.
• Do not truncate author lists with "et al." in the bibliography.

Cell Press reference formatting evolves — confirm the exact numbered format, author-list cutoff, and journal-abbreviation style against the current Molecular Cell information-for-authors page.

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → Molecular-Cell-Skills/skills/molcell-citation/SKILL.md