How to format your references using the Practical Neurology citation style

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

Buckingham S. Bioinformatics: programmed for success. Nature. 2003;425:209–15.

A journal article with 2 authors

Mattaj IW, Tocchini-Valentini GP. Laying solid foundations for Europe. Nature. 2007;447:377–8.

A journal article with 3 authors

Lutz W, Sanderson W, Scherbov S. The end of world population growth. Nature. 2001;412:543–5.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Xu J, Gao Q, Zhang Y, et al. Preparing two-dimensional microporous carbon from Pistachio nutshell with high areal capacitance as supercapacitor materials. Sci Rep. 2014;4:5545.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Promislow SD. Fundamentals of Actuarial Mathematics. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 2010.

An edited book

Mattei P. Secular Institutions, Islam and Education Policy: France and the U.S. in Comparative Perspective. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

Malinen MI, Fränti P. Balanced K-Means for Clustering. In: Fränti P, Brown G, Loog M, et al., eds. Structural, Syntactic, and Statistical Pattern Recognition: Joint IAPR International Workshop, S+SSPR 2014, Joensuu, Finland, August 20-22, 2014. Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer 2014:32–41.

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 Practical Neurology.

Blog post

Davis J. North Korea Claim to Have Cured AIDS, MERS, Ebola and SARS. IFLScience. 2015. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/north-korea-claim-have-cured-aids-mers-ebola-and-sars/ (accessed 30 October 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. Funding for Entitlement Programs. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office 1978.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Shaw RM. The influence of organizational culture on employee attitudes towards information security policy. 2012.

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

Powell M. The Home Run Explosion Is Not Exactly Beyond Suspicion. New York Times. 2017;B8.

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	Practical Neurology
Abbreviation	Pract. Neurol.
ISSN (print)	1474-7758
ISSN (online)	1474-7766
Scope	General Medicine Clinical Neurology