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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Bentley CR. 2000. Antarctica. Stirring the icy waters. Nature. 403:610–611.
A journal article with 2 authors
Reisz RR, Smith MM. 2001. Developmental biology. Lungfish dental pattern conserved for 360 Myr. Nature. 411:548.
A journal article with 3 authors
Pesaran B, Nelson MJ, Andersen RA. 2008. Free choice activates a decision circuit between frontal and parietal cortex. Nature. 453:406–409.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Springel V, White SDM, Frenk CS, Navarro JF, Jenkins A, Vogelsberger M, Wang J, Ludlow A, Helmi A. 2008. Prospects for detecting supersymmetric dark matter in the Galactic halo. Nature. 456:73–76.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Balmori D. 2014. Drawing and Reinventing Landscape. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An edited book
Lal SK (Ed.). 2010. Molecular Biology of the SARS-Coronavirus. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Wang Y, Wang H, Li J, Gao H. 2016. Efficient Influence Maximization in Weighted Independent Cascade Model. In: Navathe SB,, Wu W,, Shekhar S,, Du X,, Wang SX,, Xiong H, editors. Database Systems for Advanced Applications: 21st International Conference, DASFAA 2016, Dallas, TX, USA, April 16-19, 2016, Proceedings, Part II. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Cham: Springer International Publishing. p. 49–64.

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
Luntz S. 2015. Mummified Monk Found In Lotus Position [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/mummified-monk-lotus-position/

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. 1979. Problems Associated With Developing Large, Complex Data Processing Systems ( No. FGMSD-79-49). 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
Torres C. 2013. Grassroots in Santa Ana: Identity and conceptualizing community (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
Kishkovsky S. 2015. Russian Local Elections Draw Charges of Fraud. New York Times. A8.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Bentley 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Bentley 2000; Reisz and Smith 2001).

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

  • Two authors: (Reisz and Smith 2001)
  • Three or more authors: (Springel et al. 2008)

About the journal

Full journal titleCerebral Cortex
AbbreviationCereb. Cortex
ISSN (print)1047-3211
ISSN (online)1460-2199
ScopeCellular and Molecular Neuroscience
Cognitive Neuroscience

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