How to format your references using the Neurosurgical Review citation style

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

Smaglik P (2003) A team effort. Nature 424:471

A journal article with 2 authors

Clubb R, Mason G (2003) Animal welfare: captivity effects on wide-ranging carnivores. Nature 425:473–474

A journal article with 3 authors

Gómez-Llobregat J, Buceta J, Reigada R (2013) Interplay of cytoskeletal activity and lipid phase stability in dynamic protein recruitment and clustering. Sci Rep 3:2608

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Perozo E, Cortes DM, Sompornpisut P, Kloda A, Martinac B (2002) Open channel structure of MscL and the gating mechanism of mechanosensitive channels. Nature 418:942–948

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Holzman G CVT VTS De, Raffel T CVT VTS Su (2015) Surgical Patient Care for Veterinary Technicians and Nurses. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Schewe K-D, Thalheim B (2011) Semantics in Data and Knowledge Bases: 4th International Workshops, SDKB 2010, Bordeaux, France, July 5, 2010, Revised Selected Papers. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Fredriksen HH (2016) EEA Main Agreement and Secondary EU Law Incorporated into the Annexes and Protocols. In: Baudenbacher C (ed) The Handbook of EEA Law. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 95–110

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 Neurosurgical Review.

Blog post

Hale T (2016) This Water Stream Leaking From A Pool Looks Frozen Solid. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/physics/this-water-stream-leaking-from-a-pool-looks-frozen-solid/. 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

Government Accountability Office (2003) Business Modernization: Disciplined Processes Needed to Better Manage NASA’s Integrated Financial Management Program. 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

Harris SK (2017) Dissecting the Disappearing Act: Discussing the Dissipation of Black Male Role Models in Black Communities. Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois 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

Gordon M (2016) A Boy’s Fate. New York Times BR1

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference [2].
This sentence cites two references [3, 4].
This sentence cites four references [3, 5, 7, 8].

About the journal

Full journal title	Neurosurgical Review
Abbreviation	Neurosurg. Rev.
ISSN (print)	0344-5607
ISSN (online)	1437-2320
Scope	General Medicine Clinical Neurology Surgery