How to format your references using the Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Frontiers in Astronomy and Space 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	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

Laloë, F. (2003). Obituary: Jean Brossel (1918-2003). Nature 422, 274.

A journal article with 2 authors

Minke, B., and Peters, M. (2011). Cell biology. Rhodopsin as thermosensor? Science 331, 1272–1273.

A journal article with 3 authors

Conrad, C. P., Steinberger, B., and Torsvik, T. H. (2013). Conrad et al. reply. Nature 503, E4.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Kong, X. Y., Ding, Y., Yang, R., and Wang, Z. L. (2004). Single-crystal nanorings formed by epitaxial self-coiling of polar nanobelts. Science 303, 1348–1351.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Klöpffer, W. (2012). Verhalten und Abbau von Umweltchemikalien. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

Shamir, A., and Korat, O. eds. (2013). Technology as a Support for Literacy Achievements for Children at Risk. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Filliâtre, J.-C., and Kalyanasundaram, K. (2012). “Functory: A Distributed Computing Library for Objective Caml,” in Trends in Functional Programming: 12th International Symposium, TFP 2011, Madrid, Spain, May 16-18, 2011, Revised Selected Papers, eds. R. Peña and R. Page (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 65–81.

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 Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2015). How To Predict The Ratio Of Males To Females In Wild Animals. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/how-predict-ratio-males-females-wild-animals/ (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 (2004). Aviation Security: Improvement still Needed in Federal Aviation Security Efforts. 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

Takusi, G. S. (2010). A quantitative analysis of the extrinsic and intrinsic turnover factors of relational database support professionals. Phoenix, AZ: University of Phoenix.

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

St. John Kelly, E. (1993). PLAYING IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. New York Times, 1317.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Laloë, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Laloë, 2003; Minke and Peters, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Minke and Peters, 2011)
Three or more authors: (Kong et al., 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences
Abbreviation	Front. Astron. Space Sci.
ISSN (online)	2296-987X
Scope