How to format your references using the Neural Computing and Applications citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Neural Computing and Applications. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Find the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

Ledford H (2008) Beyond the Triangle. Nature 452:908–909

A journal article with 2 authors

Goedert M, Cheng Y (2015) Parkinson’s disease: Crystals of a toxic core. Nature 525:458–459

A journal article with 3 authors

Suzuki H, Imura J-I, Aihara K (2013) Chaotic Ising-like dynamics in traffic signals. Sci Rep 3:1127

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Musser RO, Hum-Musser SM, Eichenseer H, et al (2002) Herbivory: caterpillar saliva beats plant defences. Nature 416:599–600

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Smirnov BM (2010) Cluster Processes in Gases and Plasmas. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany

An edited book

Malone ML, Capezuti EA, Palmer RM (2015) Geriatrics Models of Care: Bringing “Best Practice” to an Aging America. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Johnson P, Nordström L, Lagerström R (2007) Formalizing Analysis of Enterprise Architecture. In: Doumeingts G, Müller J, Morel G, Vallespir B (eds) Enterprise Interoperability: New Challenges and Approaches. Springer, London, pp 35–44

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Neural Computing and Applications.

Blog post

Andrew D (2016) Ice ages Have Been Linked To The Earth’s Wobbly Orbit – But When Is The Next One? In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 2018

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office (1978) The Department of the Interior’s Computerized Resources Information Bank. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Payan Venegas R (2012) Factors associated with the lack of a regular health care provider for Latinos: Consequences and reasons. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Billard M (2010) Dust Off the Old Stock. New York Times E5

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1, 2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Neural Computing and Applications
Abbreviation	Neural Comput. Appl.
ISSN (print)	0941-0643
ISSN (online)	1433-3058
Scope	Artificial Intelligence Software