How to format your references using the Neural Networks citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Neural Networks. 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

Simmons, R. (2001). Sense and sensibility. Nature, 411(6835), 243.

A journal article with 2 authors

Destexhe, A., & Contreras, D. (2006). Neuronal computations with stochastic network states. Science (New York, N.Y.), 314(5796), 85–90.

A journal article with 3 authors

Asphaug, E., Agnor, C. B., & Williams, Q. (2006). Hit-and-run planetary collisions. Nature, 439(7073), 155–160.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Xu, S., Jiang, Y., Xu, H., Wang, J., Lin, S., Chen, H., & Zhang, B. (2014). Realization of deep subwavelength resolution with singular media. Scientific Reports, 4, 5212.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Kumar, V. (2006). Mobile Database Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Zhang, D. (2016). Discriminative Learning in Biometrics (Y. Xu & W. Zuo, Eds.). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Cardoso, J. M. P., & Diniz, P. C. (2009). Mapping and Execution Optimizations. In P. C. Diniz (Ed.), Compilation Techniques for Reconfigurable Architectures (pp. 109–154). Springer US.

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 Neural Networks.

Blog post

Evans, K. (2016, July 19). We Don’t Need To Cut Down Forests To Produce More Food, Says UN Report. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/we-dont-need-to-cut-down-forests-to-produce-more-food-says-un-report/

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. (1996). Satellite Control Capabilities: National Policy Could Help Consolidation and Cost Savings (NSIAD-96-77). U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Hardin, J. (2010). A study of social cognitive theory: The relationship between professional learning communities and collective teacher efficacy in international school settings [Doctoral dissertation]. Capella University.

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

Gregory Mankiw, N., & Summers, L. H. (2015, October 24). Uniting Behind a Divisive Health Tax. New York Times, BU6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Simmons, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Destexhe & Contreras, 2006; Simmons, 2001).

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

Two authors: (Destexhe & Contreras, 2006)
Three authors: (Asphaug et al., 2006)
6 or more authors: (Xu et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Neural Networks
Abbreviation	Neural Netw.
ISSN (print)	0893-6080
Scope	Artificial Intelligence Cognitive Neuroscience