How to format your references using the BMC Neuroscience citation style

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

1. Smith N. A blast wave from the 1843 eruption of eta Carinae. Nature. 2008;455:201–3.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. New AM, Lehner B. Systems biology: Network evolution hinges on history. Nature. 2015;523:297–8.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Agrawal T, Schu P, Medigeshi GR. Adaptor protein complexes-1 and 3 are involved at distinct stages of flavivirus life-cycle. Sci Rep. 2013;3:1813.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Welch GC, San Juan RR, Masuda JD, Stephan DW. Reversible, metal-free hydrogen activation. Science. 2006;314:1124–6.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Jepsen TC. Distributed Storage Networks. West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2003.

An edited book

1. Eyden B. The Ultrastructure of Human Tumours: Applications in Diagnosis and Research. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Bosse S. Design and Simulation of a Low-Resource Processing Platform for Mobile Multi-agent Systems in Distributed Heterogeneous Networks. In: Duval B, van den Herik J, Loiseau S, Filipe J, editors. Agents and Artificial Intelligence: 6th International Conference, ICAART 2014, Angers, France, March 6-8, 2014, Revised Selected Papers. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015. p. 63–81.

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 BMC Neuroscience.

Blog post

1. Andrew E. If We Burned All Fossil Fuels, Would Any Of Antarctica’s Ice Survive? IFLScience. 2016. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/if-we-burned-all-fossil-fuels-would-any-antarctica-s-ice-survive/. 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

1. Government Accountability Office. Small Business Innovation Research: Observations on Agencies’ Data Collection and Eligibility Determination Efforts. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2009.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Butts P. Green Roof Vegetable Production in Three Different Growth Media. Doctoral dissertation. Southern Illinois University; 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. Gorman J. One-Celled Hunter With Impressive Weapon. New York Times. 2017;:D3.

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	BMC Neuroscience
Abbreviation	BMC Neurosci.
ISSN (online)	1471-2202
Scope	General Neuroscience Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience