How to format your references using the Acta Neuropathologica citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Acta Neuropathologica. 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

Singer T (2012) Nutrition: The vitamin D complex. Nature 489:S10-1

A journal article with 2 authors

Haldane AG, May RM (2011) Systemic risk in banking ecosystems. Nature 469:351–355

A journal article with 3 authors

Thürmer K, Hwang RQ, Bartelt NC (2006) Surface self-organization caused by dislocation networks. Science 311:1272–1274

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Mourka A, Mazilu M, Wright EM, Dholakia K (2013) Modal characterization using principal component analysis: application to Bessel, higher-order Gaussian beams and their superposition. Sci Rep 3:1422

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Furmston M (2012) Powell-Smith and Furmston’s Building Contract Casebook. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK

An edited book

Grieco N, Marzegalli M, Paganoni AM (2013) New Diagnostic, Therapeutic and Organizational Strategies for Acute Coronary Syndromes Patients. Springer, Milano

A chapter in an edited book

Pullerits T, Polivka T, Sundström V (2008) Photosynthetic Light-Harvesting. In: Braun M, Gilch P, Zinth W (eds) Ultrashort Laser Pulses in Biology and Medicine. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 95–115

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 Neuropathologica.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Why More Scientists Are Needed In The Public Square. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/why-more-scientists-are-needed-public-square/. 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) Highway Safety: Monitoring Practices To Show Compliance With Speed Limits Should Be Reexamined. 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

Sugawara Y (2013) When the Spaniels conquered Central America: Academic English and first year composition instruction. Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona

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

Robinson L (2011) By the Banks of the Tigris. New York Times BR10

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 [3, 4].
This sentence cites four references [3, 5, 7, 8].

About the journal

Full journal title	Acta Neuropathologica
Abbreviation	Acta Neuropathol.
ISSN (print)	0001-6322
ISSN (online)	1432-0533
Scope	Clinical Neurology Pathology and Forensic Medicine Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience