How to format your references using the Neurosurgery Clinics of North America citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Neurosurgery Clinics of North America (NEC). 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Schultz Jack C. Biochemical ecology: how plants fight dirty. Nature 2002;416(6878):267.

A journal article with 2 authors

Domokos Gábor., Scheuring István. Random perturbations and lattice effects in chaotic population dynamics. Science 2002;297(5590):2163; discussion 2163.

A journal article with 3 authors

Mani R. G., Kriisa A., Wegscheider W. Size-dependent giant-magnetoresistance in millimeter scale GaAs/AlGaAs 2D electron devices. Sci Rep 2013;3:2747.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Xu Guizhou., Wang Wenhong., Zhang Xiaoming., et al. Weak antilocalization effect and noncentrosymmetric superconductivity in a topologically nontrivial semimetal LuPdBi. Sci Rep 2014;4:5709.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Dauphiné André. Fractal Geography. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc; 2012.

An edited book

Huang Zhen. Theory of Parallel Mechanisms. vol. 6. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands; 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

German John. Lead Time, Customers, and Technology: Technology Opportunities and Limits on the Rate of Deployment. In: Cannon James S., Sperling Daniel, editors. Reducing Climate Impacts in the Transportation Sector. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands; 2009. p. 73–100.

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 Neurosurgery Clinics of North America.

Blog post

Andrew Danielle. 7 Myths About Space You Probably Believe. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/7-myths-about-space/. Accessed October 30, 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

Government Accountability Office. Aviation Safety: Problems Persist in FAA’s Inspection Program. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1991.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Boyer Michael D. Organizational improvisation within an episodic planning model: A systems perspective. Doctoral dissertation, Capella University, Minneapolis, MN, 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

Smith Ben. Why BuzzFeed Published the Dossier. New York Times 2017:A23.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

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	Neurosurgery Clinics of North America
Abbreviation	Neurosurg. Clin. N. Am.
ISSN (print)	1042-3680
ISSN (online)	1558-1349
Scope	General Medicine Clinical Neurology Surgery