How to format your references using the Cerebral Cortex citation style

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

Zaanen J. 2009. Journal club. A theoretical physicist journeys to a hairy black hole’s horizon. Nature. 462:15.

A journal article with 2 authors

Masataka N, Perlovsky L. 2013. Cognitive interference can be mitigated by consonant music and facilitated by dissonant music. Sci Rep. 3:2028.

A journal article with 3 authors

Eagle N, Macy M, Claxton R. 2010. Network diversity and economic development. Science. 328:1029–1031.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Pan D, Kobayashi A, Jiang P, Ferrari de Andrade L, Tay RE, Luoma AM, Tsoucas D, Qiu X, Lim K, Rao P, Long HW, Yuan G-C, Doench J, Brown M, Liu XS, Wucherpfennig KW. 2018. A major chromatin regulator determines resistance of tumor cells to T cell-mediated killing. Science. 359:770–775.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hopkins BR. 2012. Starting and Managing a Nonprofit Organization. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Aral SO, Fenton KA, Lipshutz JA (Eds.). 2013. The New Public Health and STD/HIV Prevention: Personal, Public and Health Systems Approaches. New York, NY: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Shah JP. 2008. Integrating Dry Needling with New Concepts of Myofascial Pain, Muscle Physiology, and Sensitization. In: Audette JF,, Bailey A, editors. Integrative Pain Medicine: The Science and Practice of Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Pain Management. Contemporary Pain Medicine. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press. p. 107–121.

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 Cerebral Cortex.

Blog post

Andrew E. 2015. East Asian Maths Teaching Method Boosts English Children’s Progress By A Month [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/brain/east-asian-maths-teaching-method-boosts-english-children-s-progress-month/

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. 1993. Food Assistance: Schools That Left the National School Lunch Program ( No. RCED-94-36BR). Washington, DC: 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

Williams A. 2010. Kindergarten through third grade reading tutors in Northeast Mississippi (Doctoral dissertation).

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

Qiu L. 2017. Fact Check: What Trump Got Wrong at His Rally. New York Times. A15.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Zaanen 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Zaanen 2009; Masataka and Perlovsky 2013).

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

Two authors: (Masataka and Perlovsky 2013)
Three or more authors: (Pan et al. 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Cerebral Cortex
Abbreviation	Cereb. Cortex
ISSN (print)	1047-3211
ISSN (online)	1460-2199
Scope	Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience Cognitive Neuroscience