How to format your references using the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN). 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

O’Callaghan, T. (2011). Introduction: The prevention agenda. Nature, 471, S2-4

A journal article with 2 authors

Ho, W.C.G., Heinke, C.O. (2009). A neutron star with a carbon atmosphere in the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant. Nature, 462, 71–73

A journal article with 3 authors

Siegel, D.A., Doney, S.C., Yoder, J.A. (2002). The North Atlantic spring phytoplankton bloom and Sverdrup’s critical depth hypothesis. Science (New York, N.Y.), 296, 730–33

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Mota, L.J., Journet, L., Sorg, I., et al. (2005). Bacterial injectisomes: needle length does matter. Science (New York, N.Y.), 307, 1278

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Tardu, S. (2011). Statistical Approach to Wall Turbulence. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Chen, H.-H., Chowdhury, G. eds. (2012). The Outreach of Digital Libraries: A Globalized Resource Network: 14th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries, ICADL 2012, Taipei, Taiwan, November 12-15, 2012, Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Liu, X., Li, J., Zhou, D., et al. (2016). Preserving the d-Reachability When Anonymizing Social Networks. In: B. Cui, N. Zhang, J. Xu, et al. (eds). Web-Age Information Management: 17th International Conference, WAIM 2016, Nanchang, China, June 3-5, 2016, Proceedings, Part II. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Cham: Springer International Publishing, p. 40–51.

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 Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Blog post

Luntz, S. (2014). New Blood Test Diagnoses Depression. 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 (1985). Use of the Public Law 94-142 Set-Aside Shows Both the Flexibility Intended by the Law and the Need for Improved Reporting. 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

Krishna, V. (2008). Exploring organizational commitment from an organizational perspective: Organizational learning as a determinant of affective commitment in Indian software firms. Doctoral dissertation. Washington, DC: George Washington 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

Detrick, B. (2017). Et Al. New York Times, D6

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (O’Callaghan, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Ho and Heinke, 2009; O’Callaghan, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Ho and Heinke, 2009)
Three or more authors: (Mota et al., 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
Abbreviation	Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci.
ISSN (print)	1749-5016
ISSN (online)	1749-5024
Scope	General Medicine Cognitive Neuroscience Experimental and Cognitive Psychology