How to format your references using the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine. 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

Reichstein M: Journal club. A biogeochemist looks at where all the emitted carbon dioxide is going. Nature 464:145, 2010

A journal article with 2 authors

Jackson JB, Johnson KG: Paleoecology. Measuring past biodiversity. Science 293:2401–2404, 2001

A journal article with 3 authors

Dunn EW, Aknin LB, Norton MI: Spending money on others promotes happiness. Science 319:1687–1688, 2008

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Velliste M, Perel S, Spalding MC, Whitford AS, Schwartz AB: Cortical control of a prosthetic arm for self-feeding. Nature 453:1098–1101, 2008

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Karamalidis AK, Dzombak DA: Surface Complexation Modeling. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010

An edited book

Robinson P, Vogt H, Wagealla W (eds): Privacy, Security and Trust within the Context of Pervasive Computing. Boston, MA: Springer US, 2005

A chapter in an edited book

Eversmann P, Ehret P, Louter C, Santarsiero M: Application of Hybrid Glass-Timber Elements in Architecture, in Block P , Knippers J , Mitra NJ , Wang W (eds): Advances in Architectural Geometry 2014. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015, pp 47–59

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 Neurosurgery: Spine.

Blog post

Andrew E: Pod Of Orcas Caught With An Enormous Eyeball. 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: Drug Abuse Control Program Activities in Vietnam. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Heredia R: Leadership Development in a Multigenerational Workplace: An Exploratory Study. 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

Aikins M: Reading the Wreckage. New York Times:MM37, 2016

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

This sentence cites one reference ².
This sentence cites two references ^3,4.
This sentence cites four references ^4–6,8.

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine
Abbreviation	J. Neurosurg. Spine
ISSN (print)	1547-5654
ISSN (online)	1547-5646
Scope	General Medicine