How to format your references using the Neuroscience Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Neuroscience 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	Download the output style file
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

[1]

S.L. Lewis, Scientist-versus-activist debates mislead the public, Nature 506 (2014) 409.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

E.P. Mimitou, L.S. Symington, Sae2, Exo1 and Sgs1 collaborate in DNA double-strand break processing, Nature 455 (2008) 770–774.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

T.H. Clutton-Brock, T. Coulson, J.M. Milner, Red deer stocks in the Highlands of Scotland, Nature 429 (2004) 261–262.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

J. Wu, T.Y. Kwok, X. Li, W. Cao, Y. Wang, J. Huang, Y. Hong, D. Zhang, W. Wen, Mapping three-dimensional temperature in microfluidic chip, Sci. Rep. 3 (2013) 3321.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

S. Anwar, J.J. Carroll, Carbon Dioxide Thermodynamic Properties Handbook, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2016.

An edited book

[1]

J.R. Correa, A. Hevia, M. Kiwi, eds., LATIN 2006: Theoretical Informatics: 7th Latin American Symposium, Valdivia, Chile, March 20-24, 2006. Proceedings, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A. Gounaris, J. Smith, N.W. Paton, R. Sakellariou, A.A.A. Fernandes, P. Watson, Adapting to Changing Resource Performance in Grid Query Processing, in: J.-M. Pierson (Ed.), Data Management in Grids: First VLDB Workshop, DMG 2005, Trondheim, Norway, September 2-3, 2005, Revised Selected Papers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006: pp. 30–44.

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 Neuroscience Letters.

Blog post

[1]

K. Hamilton, What Would Happen If The Earth Were Flat?, IFLScience (2014).

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Youth Job Training: Problems Measuring Attainment of Employment Competencies, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1987.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

M.A. Tengco, Quality Home Care: Providing Personal Care and Homemaking Services for Seniors in the Community, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2017.

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

[1]

K. Crow, Fireman’s Spirit Is the Wind Beneath a Bird’s Wings, New York Times (2001) 146.

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	Neuroscience Letters
Abbreviation	Neurosci. Lett.
ISSN (print)	0304-3940
Scope	General Neuroscience