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:

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
Bonetta, L., 2006. Protein purification: protein purification for structural proteomics. Nature 439, 1018.
A journal article with 2 authors
Junge, W., Rutherford, A.W., 2007. Obituary: Horst Tobias Witt (1922-2007). Nature 448, 425.
A journal article with 3 authors
Grirrane, A., Corma, A., García, H., 2008. Gold-catalyzed synthesis of aromatic azo compounds from anilines and nitroaromatics. Science 322, 1661–1664.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Koide, S., Huang, X., Link, K., Koide, A., Bu, Z., Engelman, D.M., 2000. Design of single-layer beta-sheets without a hydrophobic core. Nature 403, 456–460.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Hoskins, B.J., James, I.N., 2014. Fluid Dynamics of the Midlatitude Atmosphere. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester.
An edited book
Capriz, G., Stampacchia, G. (Eds.), 2011. New Variational Techniques in Mathematical Physics, C.I.M.E. Summer Schools. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
A chapter in an edited book
Brinson, M.M., 2011. Classification of Wetlands, in: LePage, B.A. (Ed.), Wetlands: Integrating Multidisciplinary Concepts. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp. 95–113.

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
Felton, J., 2017. This Guy Stopped The Biggest Ransomware Attack In History. This Was His Reward .. [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/technology/this-guy-stopped-the-biggest-ransomware-attack-in-history-this-was-his-reward-/ (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. Need To Reexamine JTIDS Requirements and Architecture (No. MASAD-82-28). 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
Guarin, Y., 2017. A Postpartum Support Group for Women Experiencing Postpartum Depression: A Grant Proposal (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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
Herzlinger, M., 2017. Day Out for Dad and Daughter. New York Times A23.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Bonetta, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Bonetta, 2006; Junge and Rutherford, 2007).

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

  • Two authors: (Junge and Rutherford, 2007)
  • Three or more authors: (Koide et al., 2000)

About the journal

Full journal titleMolecular and Cellular Neuroscience
AbbreviationMol. Cell. Neurosci.
ISSN (print)1044-7431
ScopeCell Biology
Molecular Biology
Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

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