How to format your references using the Journal of Neuroscience Methods citation style

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

Manolopoulos, D.E., 2002. Reaction dynamics. Bending or breaking the rules? Science 296, 664.

A journal article with 2 authors

Barkman, T., Zhang, J., 2009. Evidence for escape from adaptive conflict? Nature 462, E1; discussion E2-3.

A journal article with 3 authors

Cysouw, M., Dediu, D., Moran, S., 2012. Comment on “Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa.” Science 335, 657; author reply 657.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Wang, Y., Akiyama, H., Terakado, K., Nakatsu, T., 2013. Impact of site-directed mutant luciferase on quantitative green and orange/red emission intensities in firefly bioluminescence. Sci. Rep. 3, 2490.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Tagare, D.M., 2011. Electric Power Generation. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Klous, S., 2016. We are Big Data: The Future of the Information Society. Atlantis Press, Paris.

A chapter in an edited book

Donovan, G.T., 2014. Opening Proprietary Ecologies, in: Gudmundsdottir, G.B., Vasbø, K.B. (Eds.), Methodological Challenges When Exploring Digital Learning Spaces in Education. SensePublishers, Rotterdam, pp. 65–77.

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 Journal of Neuroscience Methods.

Blog post

Davis, J., 2017. Original Proteins Have Been Extracted From An 80-Million-Year-Old Fossil [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/original-proteins-have-been-extracted-from-an-80millionyearold-fossil/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1982. Improper Use of Federal Student Aid Funds for Lobbying Activities (No. HRD-82-108). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Wester, A.M., 2013. Readers’ trust, socio-demographic, and acuity influences in citizen journalism credibility for disrupted online newspapers (Doctoral dissertation). University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ.

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

Robert Kelly; Robert Kelly is a poet, fiction writer whose most recent book is ’ ’A Transparent Tree, ’ ’ a collection of short fiction. He teaches at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, at Bard College, 1986. ORDINARY SPLENDORS. New York Times 725.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Manolopoulos, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Barkman and Zhang, 2009; Manolopoulos, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Barkman and Zhang, 2009)
Three or more authors: (Wang et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Neuroscience Methods
Abbreviation	J. Neurosci. Methods
ISSN (print)	0165-0270
Scope	General Neuroscience