How to format your references using the Neural Processing Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Neural Processing Letters. 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

Friedman N (2004) Inferring cellular networks using probabilistic graphical models. Science 303:799–805

A journal article with 2 authors

Thompson WG, Goldstein SL (2005) Open-system coral ages reveal persistent suborbital sea-level cycles. Science 308:401–404

A journal article with 3 authors

Villegas P, Moretti P, Muñoz MA (2014) Frustrated hierarchical synchronization and emergent complexity in the human connectome network. Sci Rep 4:5990

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Bshary R, Grutter AS, Willener AST, Leimar O (2008) Pairs of cooperating cleaner fish provide better service quality than singletons. Nature 455:964–966

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Wittcoff HA, Reuben BG, Plotkin JS (2012) Industrial Organic Chemicals. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Amara A, Rozeau O (2009) Planar Double-Gate Transistor: From Technology to Circuit. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Bucksbaum PH (2013) Ultrafast Quantum Control in Atoms and Molecules. In: Thomson R, Leburn C, Reid D (eds) Ultrafast Nonlinear Optics. Springer International Publishing, Heidelberg, pp 105–128

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 Processing Letters.

Blog post

Carpineti C (2017) New Stem Cell Method Produces Millions of Human Brain Cells In Days. 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 (1985) Commercializing Landsat and the Weather Satellites. 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

Golf F (2012) Search for New Physics in a Final State with Same-Sign Dileptons, Jets, and Missing Transverse Energy at 7 TeV Center of Mass Energy. Doctoral dissertation, University of California San Diego

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

Vecsey G (2010) Less Than Two Years In, Sanchez Era Has Arrived. New York Times D5

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 Processing Letters
Abbreviation	Neural Process. Lett.
ISSN (print)	1370-4621
ISSN (online)	1573-773X
Scope	Artificial Intelligence Computer Networks and Communications Software General Neuroscience