How to format your references using the The Journal of Comparative Neurology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The Journal of Comparative 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Moore PD. 2000. Conservation biology. Seeds of doubt. Nature 407:683, 685.
A journal article with 2 authors
Seitz AR, Watanabe T. 2003. Psychophysics: Is subliminal learning really passive? Nature 422:36.
A journal article with 3 authors
Ellwood MJ, Wille M, Maher W. 2010. Glacial silicic acid concentrations in the Southern Ocean. Science 330:1088–1091.
A journal article with 99 or more authors
Slanger TG, Cosby PC, Huestis DL, Bida TA. 2001. Discovery of the atomic oxygen green line in the Venus night airglow. Science 291:463–465.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Shover L. 2013. Trading Options in Turbulent Markets. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Širáň J, Jajcay R eds. 2016. Symmetries in Graphs, Maps, and Polytopes: 5th SIGMAP Workshop, West Malvern, UK, July 2014. 1st ed. 2016. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
A chapter in an edited book
Harrison J. 2007. Automating Elementary Number-Theoretic Proofs Using Gröbner Bases. In: Pfenning F, editor. Automated Deduction – CADE-21: 21st International Conference on Automated Deduction Bremen, Germany, July 17-20, 2007 Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. p 51–66.

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 The Journal of Comparative Neurology.

Blog post
Hale T. 2016. Luminescent Bike Paths Light Up Town In Poland. 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. 2003. Telecommunications: Data Gathering Weaknesses In FCC’s Survey Of Information on Factors Underlying Cable Rate Changes. 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
Perilla JY. 2015. Support group for neonatal intensive care families: A grant proposal.

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
Hodgman J. 2017. I Am Sorry for This Mess. New York Times:SR8.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Moore, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Moore, 2000; Seitz and Watanabe, 2003).

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

  • Two authors: (Seitz and Watanabe, 2003)
  • Three or more authors: (Slanger et al., 2001)

About the journal

Full journal titleThe Journal of Comparative Neurology
AbbreviationJ. Comp. Neurol.
ISSN (print)0021-9967
ISSN (online)1096-9861
ScopeGeneral Neuroscience

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