How to format your references using the Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience. 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

Chi, K.R., 2015. Masculinity: Men’s makeover. Nature 526, S12-3.

A journal article with 2 authors

Downing, A.L., Leibold, M.A., 2002. Ecosystem consequences of species richness and composition in pond food webs. Nature 416, 837–841.

A journal article with 3 authors

Mogilner, A., Allard, J., Wollman, R., 2012. Cell polarity: quantitative modeling as a tool in cell biology. Science 336, 175–179.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Oliveira, R.F., Lopes, M., Carneiro, L.A., Canário, A.V., 2001. Watching fights raises fish hormone levels. Nature 409, 475.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Filla, J.J., Brown, H.E., 2013. Prospect Research for Fundraisers. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Leon-Garcia, A., Lenort, R., Holman, D., Staš, D., Krutilova, V., Wicher, P., Cagáňová, D., Špirková, D., Golej, J., Nguyen, K. (Eds.), 2016. Smart City 360°: First EAI International Summit, Smart City 360°, Bratislava, Slovakia and Toronto, Canada, October 13-16, 2015. Revised Selected Papers, Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Yang, J., Liu, Y., 2015. Single Training Sample Face Recognition Based on Gabor and 2DPCA, in: Tan, T., Ruan, Q., Wang, S., Ma, H., Di, K. (Eds.), Advances in Image and Graphics Technologies: 10th Chinese Conference, IGTA 2015, Beijing, China, June 19-20, 2015, Proceedings, Communications in Computer and Information Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 37–44.

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 Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2014. Destruction of Amazon Rainforest Visible From Space [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (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, 1999. Aviation: Issues Associated With the Theft of Stock Used to Create Airline Tickets (No. RCED-99-219). 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

Lundahl Philpot, E., 2013. Social media adoption and use among information technology professionals and implications for leadership (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

Williams, J., 2017. Where Everybody Knows Your Name (and Dad’s). New York Times C5.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Chi, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Chi, 2015; Downing and Leibold, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Downing and Leibold, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Oliveira et al., 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience
Abbreviation	Mol. Cell. Neurosci.
ISSN (print)	1044-7431
Scope	Cell Biology Molecular Biology Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience