How to format your references using the Neuroscience Letters citation style

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

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

[1]

R. Smith, An end to violence, Nature 406 (2000) 567.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

R.J. Williams, N.D. Martinez, Simple rules yield complex food webs, Nature 404 (2000) 180–183.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

G.R. Lampard, C.A. Macalister, D.C. Bergmann, Arabidopsis stomatal initiation is controlled by MAPK-mediated regulation of the bHLH SPEECHLESS, Science 322 (2008) 1113–1116.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

X. Veaute, J. Jeusset, C. Soustelle, S.C. Kowalczykowski, E. Le Cam, F. Fabre, The Srs2 helicase prevents recombination by disrupting Rad51 nucleoprotein filaments, Nature 423 (2003) 309–312.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

A.A. Bruen, M.A. Forcinito, Cryptography, Information Theory, and Error-Correction, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2004.

An edited book

[1]

N.D. Hartlep, Asian/American Curricular Epistemicide: From Being Excluded to Becoming a Model Minority, SensePublishers, Rotterdam, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

T. Kato, Linear and Quasi-Linear Equations of Evolution of Hyperbolic Type, in: G.D. Prato, G. Geymonat (Eds.), Hyperbolicity: Lectures given at the Centro Internazionale Matematico Estivo (C.I.M.E.), Held in Cortona (Arezzo), Italy, June 24 – July 2, 1976, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011: pp. 125–191.

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 Neuroscience Letters.

Blog post

[1]

J. O`Callaghan, NASA’s Curiosity Rover Spots Metallic Object On Mars, IFLScience (2017).

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, Problems in Regulating Selected Vaccines, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1973.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

L. Tovar, Perceived life satisfaction of previously undocumented Latino immigrants, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2009.

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]

J. Wagner, Syndergaard Brings the Heat, and the Mets’ Bats End Their Chilly Start, New York Times (2017) D6.

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 title	Neuroscience Letters
Abbreviation	Neurosci. Lett.
ISSN (print)	0304-3940
Scope	General Neuroscience