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

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

Antonelli A (2015) Biodiversity: Multiple origins of mountain life. Nature 524:300–301.

A journal article with 2 authors

Lu X, Brelsford C (2014) Network structure and community evolution on Twitter: human behavior change in response to the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Sci Rep 4:6773.

A journal article with 3 authors

Burns PC, Ewing RC, Navrotsky A (2012) Nuclear fuel in a reactor accident. Science 335:1184–1188.

A journal article with 20 or more authors

Hirata H, Yoshiura S, Ohtsuka T, Bessho Y, Harada T, Yoshikawa K, Kageyama R (2002) Oscillatory expression of the bHLH factor Hes1 regulated by a negative feedback loop. Science 298:840–843.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Pilot MJ (2014) Driving Sustainability to Business Success. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Neyer G, Andersson G, Kulu H, Bernardi L, Bühler C eds. (2013) The Demography of Europe. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Zhang X, Yang X, Li Q (2015) The Data Envelopment Analysis of Eco-efficiency in Western China from 2000 to 2010. In: Proceedings of 2014 1st International Conference on Industrial Economics and Industrial Security (Li M, Zhang Q, Zhang R, Shi X, eds), pp 25–32. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

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 Neuroscience.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Will Head Transplants Create An Entirely New Person? IFLScience Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/brain/will-head-transplants-create-entirely-new-person/ [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 (1973) Use of Appropriated Funds as Impact Aid to Educational Agencies. 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

Fails JA (2009) Mobile collaboration for young children: Reading and creating stories.

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

Baker L (2009) Optimism in the Mormon Heartland. New York Times:B6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Antonelli, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Lu and Brelsford, 2014; Antonelli, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Lu and Brelsford, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Hirata et al., 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	The Journal of Neuroscience
Abbreviation	J. Neurosci.
ISSN (print)	0270-6474
ISSN (online)	1529-2401
Scope	General Neuroscience

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