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.

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
1.
Colquhoun, D. Science degrees without the science. Nature. 446 (7134), 373–374 (2007).
A journal article with 2 authors
1.
Richmond, T.J., Davey, C.A. The structure of DNA in the nucleosome core. Nature. 423 (6936), 145–150 (2003).
A journal article with 3 authors
1.
Rawson, P.D., Yund, P.O., Lindsay, S.M. Comment on “Divergent induced responses to an invasive predator in marine mussel populations.” Science (New York, N.Y.). 316 (5821), 53; author reply 53 (2007).
A journal article with 7 or more authors
1.
Wei, B.-B., Chen, S.-W., Po, H.-C., Liu, R.-B. Phase transitions in the complex plane of physical parameters. Scientific reports. 4, 5202 (2014).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
1.
Jaitly, R. Practical Operational Due Diligence on Hedge Funds. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Chichester, UK. (2016).
An edited book
1.
Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XIII: 13th International Conference, Ljubljana, Slovenia, September 13-17, 2014. Proceedings. 8672. Springer International Publishing. Cham. (2014).
A chapter in an edited book
1.
Haque, M.S. Reinventing Public Governance in Singapore: Major Reform Premises, Initiatives, and Consequences. Challenges to Democratic Governance in Developing Countries. 73–92 (2014).

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.
Andrew, E. World’s First Solar Cycle Path Installed In Amsterdam. IFLScience. at <https://www.iflscience.com/technology/worlds-first-solar-cycle-path-installed-amsterdam/> (2014).

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 Social Security Offsets: Improvements to Program Design Could Better Assist Older Student Loan Borrowers with Obtaining Permitted Relief. U.S. Government Printing Office. Washington, DC. (2016).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
1.
Zhu, M. Numerical Investigation of Encapsulation Technology in Polymer Flooding Processes (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
1.
Fink, S. Even Nightmares Are Classified. New York Times. A1 (2016).

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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