How to format your references using the Brain and Language citation style

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

Seiff, A. (2000). Dynamics of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Nature, 403(6770), 603, 605.

A journal article with 2 authors

Britt, R. D., & Oyala, P. H. (2014). Biochemistry. One step closer to O₂. Science (New York, N.Y.), 345(6198), 736.

A journal article with 3 authors

Yoshimura, K., Onda, Y., & Fukushima, T. (2014). Sediment particle size and initial radiocesium accumulation in ponds following the Fukushima DNPP accident. Scientific Reports, 4, 4514.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Lee, H.-R., Lee, K., Cho, J., Choi, Y.-H., You, C.-Y., Jung, M.-H., Bonell, F., Shiota, Y., Miwa, S., & Suzuki, Y. (2014). Spin-orbit torque in a bulk perpendicular magnetic anisotropy Pd/FePd/MgO system. Scientific Reports, 4, 6548.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bagdonavičius, V., Kruopis, J., & Nikulin, M. S. (2011). Non-parametric Tests for Censored Data. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Webber, C. L., Jr., & Marwan, N. (Eds.). (2015). Recurrence Quantification Analysis: Theory and Best Practices. Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Nguyen, T., Phung, D., Adams, B., & Venkatesh, S. (2012). Emotional Reactions to Real-World Events in Social Networks. In L. Cao, J. Z. Huang, J. Bailey, Y. S. Koh, & J. Luo (Eds.), New Frontiers in Applied Data Mining: PAKDD 2011 International Workshops, Shenzhen, China, May 24-27, 2011, Revised Selected Papers (pp. 53–64). Springer.

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 Brain and Language.

Blog post

Luntz, S. (2015, July 13). Mountains Drive Evolution. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/mountain-building-drives-evolutionary-pulses/

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. (2013). Information Technology: DHS Needs to Enhance Management of Major Investments (GAO-13-478T). U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Stout, J. (2017). The Effects of Discipline with African-American Males at an Alternative Middle School: The Perceptions of Parents/Guardians, Teachers, Administrators, and Other Academic Stakeholders [Doctoral dissertation]. Northcentral 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

Otis, J. (2016, December 14). A Tutor Is Inspired to Keep Learning. New York Times, A25.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Seiff, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Britt & Oyala, 2014; Seiff, 2000).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Britt & Oyala, 2014)
Three authors: (Yoshimura et al., 2014)
6 or more authors: (Lee et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Brain and Language
Abbreviation	Brain Lang.
ISSN (print)	0093-934X
Scope	Language and Linguistics Cognitive Neuroscience Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Linguistics and Language Speech and Hearing