How to format your references using the Acta Neurochirurgica citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Acta Neurochirurgica. 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 references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles 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

Dede C (2009) Immersive interfaces for engagement and learning. Science 323(5910):66–69

A journal article with 2 authors

Müller F-J, Schuppert A (2011) Few inputs can reprogram biological networks. Nature 478(7369):E4; discussion E4-5

A journal article with 3 authors

Costello MJ, May RM, Stork NE (2013) Response to comments on “Can we name Earth’s species before they go extinct?” Science 341(6143):237

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Wilf P, Labandeira CC, Johnson KR, Ellis B (2006) Decoupled plant and insect diversity after the end-Cretaceous extinction. Science 313(5790):1112–1115

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Schulze V (2005) Modern Mechanical Surface Treatment. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, FRG

An edited book

Paipetis A, Kostopoulos V (eds) (2013) Carbon Nanotube Enhanced Aerospace Composite Materials: A New Generation of Multifunctional Hybrid Structural Composites. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Bossomaier T, Barnett L, Harré M, Lizier JT (2016) Information Transfer in Canonical Systems. In: Barnett L, Harré M, Lizier JT (eds) An Introduction to Transfer Entropy: Information Flow in Complex Systems. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 97–123

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 Acta Neurochirurgica.

Blog post

Carpineti A (2015) How Clean Is The International Space Station? In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/how-clean-iss/. 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 (2015) Pedestrians and Cyclists: Cities, States, and DOT Are Implementing Actions to Improve Safety. 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

Travis MJ (2008) The relationship between a connections math class and math Criterion Referenced Competency Test scores. Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix

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

Hubbard B (2017) Saudi Arabia Detains Critics of Crown Prince. New York Times A4

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference [2].
This sentence cites two references [2, 4].
This sentence cites four references [4–6, 8].

About the journal

Full journal title	Acta Neurochirurgica
Abbreviation	Acta Neurochir. (Wien)
ISSN (print)	0001-6268
ISSN (online)	0942-0940
Scope	Clinical Neurology Surgery