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

Gershon D (2000) Partners resolve their differences and unite at the second attempt. Nature 405(6783):258

A journal article with 2 authors

Ishikawa H, Barber GN (2008) STING is an endoplasmic reticulum adaptor that facilitates innate immune signalling. Nature 455(7213):674–678

A journal article with 3 authors

Andrew TL, Tsai H-Y, Menon R (2009) Confining light to deep subwavelength dimensions to enable optical nanopatterning. Science 324(5929):917–921

A journal article with 11 or more authors

O’Dowd CD, Facchini MC, Cavalli F, Ceburnis D, Mircea M, Decesari S, Fuzzi S, Yoon YJ, Putaud J-P (2004) Biogenically driven organic contribution to marine aerosol. Nature 431(7009):676–680

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Caferro W (2010) Contesting the Renaissance. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK

An edited book

Altman E, Shi W (eds) (2011) Network and Parallel Computing: 8th IFIP International Conference, NPC 2011, Changsha, China, October 21-23, 2011. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Sachithanadam M, Joshi SC (2016) A New Phenomenon—Brittle to Ductile Transition. In: Joshi SC (ed) Silica Aerogel Composites: Novel Fabrication Methods. Springer, Singapore, pp 51–80

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

Luntz S (2015) Star Clusters Unexpectedly Spawning New Stars. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/star-clusters-unexpectedly-spawning-new-stars/. 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 (1988) FAA Staffing: Improvements Needed in Estimating Air Traffic Controller Requirements. 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

Yasar K (2009) Electrified voices: Media technology and discourse in modern Japan. Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University

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

Neuman W (2015) Brutal Past and Promising Future Clash in Colombian City. 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

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