How to format your references using the Journal of Visualized Experiments citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Visualized Experiments. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

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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.
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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
1.
Wulff, K. Examining knowledge of geometry. Science (New York, N.Y.). 312 (5778), 1309–10; author reply 1309-10 (2006).
A journal article with 2 authors
1.
Bossuyt, F., Milinkovitch, M.C. Amphibians as indicators of early tertiary “out-of-India” dispersal of vertebrates. Science (New York, N.Y.). 292 (5514), 93–95 (2001).
A journal article with 3 authors
1.
Kaaret, P., Simet, M.G., Lang, C.C. The orbital period of the ultraluminous x-ray source in M82. Science (New York, N.Y.). 311 (5760), 491 (2006).
A journal article with 7 or more authors
1.
Zhang, Y., Liu, Y., Chen, J., Guo, Q., Wang, T., Pang, H. Cobalt vanadium oxide thin nanoplates: primary electrochemical capacitor application. Scientific reports. 4, 5687 (2014).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
1.
Vitale, J., Len, I.H. Zero Limits. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Hoboken, NJ. (2008).
An edited book
1.
JIMD Reports, Volume 28. 28. Springer. Berlin, Heidelberg. (2016).
A chapter in an edited book
1.
Pakray, P., Pal, S., Poria, S., Bandyopadhyay, S., Gelbukh, A. SMSFR: SMS-Based FAQ Retrieval System. Advances in Computational Intelligence: 11th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2012, San Luis Potosí, Mexico, October 27 – November 4, 2012. Revised Selected Papers, Part II. 36–45 (2013).

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 Visualized Experiments.

Blog post
1.
Davis, J. Parasitic Beetle Mimics Ants By “Speaking” Three Different “Languages.” IFLScience. at <https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/parasitic-beetle-mimics-ants-speaking-three-different-languages/> (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
1.
Government Accountability Office Federal Program To Strengthen Developing Institutions of Higher Education Lacks Direction. U.S. Government Printing Office. Washington, DC. (1979).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
1.
Boysen, J. The ESCRT machinery, required for endosomal trafficking, is a pH-signaling platform (2008).

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
1.
Baker, P., Schmidt, M.S., Haberman, M. Trump Lashes Out At Russia Inquiry And Its Overseers. New York Times. A1 (2017).

In-text citations

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

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 titleJournal of Visualized Experiments
AbbreviationJ. Vis. Exp.
ISSN (online)1940-087X
ScopeGeneral Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
General Chemical Engineering
General Immunology and Microbiology
General Neuroscience

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