How to format your references using the Neuron citation style

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

Chun, J. (2007). Immunology. The sources of a lipid conundrum. Science 316, 208–210. .

A journal article with 2 authors

Nielsen, T., and Kuijpers, A. (2013). Only 5 southern Greenland shelf edge glaciations since the early Pliocene. Sci. Rep. 3, 1875. .

A journal article with 3 authors

Brown, M.S., Ye, J., and Goldstein, J.L. (2010). Medicine. HDL miR-ed down by SREBP introns. Science 328, 1495–1496. .

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Lee, H., Lee, J.-W., Kim, D.Y., Park, J., Seo, Y.-T., Zeng, H., Moudrakovski, I.L., Ratcliffe, C.I., and Ripmeester, J.A. (2005). Tuning clathrate hydrates for hydrogen storage. Nature 434, 743–746. .

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Lu, M. (2005). Arithmetic and Logic in Computer Systems (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

An edited book

Sardanelli, F. (2008). Biostatistica in Radiologia: Progettare, realizzare e scrivere un lavoro scientifico radiologico (Milano: Springer).

A chapter in an edited book

Law, N., Yuen, A., and Fox, R. (2011). Pedagogical Practices, Technology Use, and Teacher Competence. In Educational Innovations Beyond Technology: Nurturing Leadership and Establishing Learning Organizations, A. Yuen, and R. Fox, eds. (Boston, MA: Springer US), pp. 89–111.

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 Neuron.

Blog post

Andrews, R. (2017). Electrical Shocks Bring Patients Out Of Comatose States For Up To A Week (IFLScience).

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 (1998). NASA Procurement: Status of Efforts to Improve Oversight (Washington, DC: 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

Matheny, A.L. (2009). Home gardener preferences, perceptions, knowledge and behaviors associated with pest management strategies and information acquisition. Doctoral dissertation. University of Maryland, College Park.

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

Whiteside, K. (2015). Same High Ideals, All New Challenges. New York Times B10. .

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Chun, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Chun, 2007; Nielsen and Kuijpers, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Nielsen and Kuijpers, 2013)
Three or more authors: (Lee et al., 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Neuron
Abbreviation	Neuron
ISSN (print)	0896-6273
ISSN (online)	1097-4199
Scope	General Neuroscience

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