How to format your references using the Neural Processing Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Neural Processing Letters. 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.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
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.
Nilsson J (2004) Scientists and societies. Junior Faculty at the Karolinska Institute. Nature 427:470
A journal article with 2 authors
1.
O’Brien SJ, Murphy WJ (2003) Genomics. A dog’s breakfast? Science 301:1854–1855
A journal article with 3 authors
1.
Rust MJ, Golden SS, O’Shea EK (2011) Light-driven changes in energy metabolism directly entrain the cyanobacterial circadian oscillator. Science 331:220–223
A journal article with 5 or more authors
1.
Gómez MI, Barrett CB, Buck LE, et al (2011) Agriculture. Research principles for developing country food value chains. Science 332:1154–1155

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
1.
Lindahl D (2008) Trump University Commercial Real Estate 101. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ
An edited book
1.
Aseeva R (2014) Fire Behavior and Fire Protection in Timber Buildings. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht
A chapter in an edited book
1.
Knödler K, Poland J, Merz P, Zell A (2005) Using Memetic Algorithms for Optimal Calibration of Automotive Internal Combustion Engines. In: Hart WE, Smith JE, Krasnogor N (eds) Recent Advances in Memetic Algorithms. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 87–104

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 Processing Letters.

Blog post
1.
Andrew E (2015) Climate Meme Debunked As The ‘Tropospheric Hot Spot’ Is Found. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/climate-meme-debunked-tropospheric-hot-spot-found/. Accessed 30 Oct 2018

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 (2011) Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration: Additional Actions Needed to Strengthen Grants Management. 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
1.
Hebbard MT (2015) A Depositional Analysis of the Reeves Sand in Beauregard and Allen Parishes, Louisiana. Doctoral dissertation, University of Louisiana

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.
Schmitt E (2017) U.S. Says Its ISIS Fight Isn’t Raising Civilian Risks. New York Times A5

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

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 titleNeural Processing Letters
AbbreviationNeural Process. Lett.
ISSN (print)1370-4621
ISSN (online)1573-773X
ScopeArtificial Intelligence
Computer Networks and Communications
Software
General Neuroscience

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