How to format your references using the Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Franson JD: Physics. Pairs rule quantum interference. Science 2010, 329:396–397.

A journal article with 2 authors

Banfield JF, Young M: Microbiology. Variety--the splice of life--in microbial communities. Science 2009, 326:1198–1199.

A journal article with 3 authors

Gerber LR, Hyrenbach KD, Zacharias MA: Ecology. Do the largest protected areas conserve whales or whalers? Science 2005, 307:525–526.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Sundar VC, Zaumseil J, Podzorov V, Menard E, Willett RL, Someya T, Gershenson ME, Rogers JA: Elastomeric transistor stamps: reversible probing of charge transport in organic crystals. Science 2004, 303:1644–1646.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Molimard J: Experimental Mechanics of Solids and Structures. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2016.

An edited book

Pande A: Embedded Multimedia Security Systems: Algorithms and Architectures. Springer; 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

Zhang Q, Zhang Q, Long G, Zhang P, Zhang C: Exploring Heterogeneous Product Networks for Discovering Collective Marketing Hyping Behavior. In Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: 20th Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2016, Auckland, New Zealand, April 19-22, 2016, Proceedings, Part I. Edited by Bailey J, Khan L, Washio T, Dobbie G, Huang JZ, Wang R. Springer International Publishing; 2016:40–51.

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 Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences.

Blog post

Andrew E: Anti-Psychotic Drugs Designed To Treat Mental Illness Are Being Used To Manage Challenging Behaviour. IFLScience 2015,

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: U.S.-Korea Fighter Coproduction Program--the F-16 Version. U.S. Government Printing Office; 1991.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Bavkar IN: In-Node Vehicle Classification and Identification. 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

Vecsey G: A Different World Is Awaiting the U.S. New York Times 2009,

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	Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences
Abbreviation	Curr. Opin. Behav. Sci.
ISSN (print)	2352-1546
Scope