How to format your references using the Trends in Cognitive Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 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

Watts, C. (2004) Immunology. The bell tolls for phagosome maturation. Science 304, 976–977

A journal article with 2 authors

McAndrew, P. and Scanlon, E. (2013) Education. Open learning at a distance: lessons for struggling MOOCs. Science 342, 1450–1451

A journal article with 3 authors

Li, C. et al. (2014) The exclusion of a significant range of ages in a massive star cluster. Nature 516, 367–369

A journal article with 3 or more authors

Warren, S.M. et al. (2003) The BMP antagonist noggin regulates cranial suture fusion. Nature 422, 625–629

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Adamczyk, B. (2017) Foundations of Electromagnetic Compatibility, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

An edited book

Uesugi, S., ed. (2013) IT Enabled Services, Springer

A chapter in an edited book

Simos, D.E. et al. (2016) A Combinatorial Approach to Analyzing Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerabilities in Web Application Security Testing. In Testing Software and Systems: 28th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, ICTSS 2016, Graz, Austria, October 17-19, 2016, Proceedings (Wotawa, F. et al., eds), pp. 70–85, Springer International Publishing

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 Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Blog post

Davis, J. (2015) FDA Panel Backs Experimental Drug That Improves Women’s Sex Drives. IFLScience. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/fda-panel-support-female-viagra-approval/. [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 (1996) Urban Transportation: Metropolitan Planning Organizations’ Efforts to Meet Federal Planning Requirements, 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

Quiroz, C.A. (2012) A community risk assessment of 90032. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

Grynbaum, M.M. (2017) Fox Trades Motto of ‘Fair and Balanced’ for ‘Most Watched, Most Trusted’New York Times, 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	Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Abbreviation	Trends Cogn. Sci.
ISSN (print)	1364-6613
ISSN (online)	1879-307X
Scope	Cognitive Neuroscience Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology