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

Thomas, C. (2011). Cardiovascular biology. Nature 473, 297.

A journal article with 2 authors

Yuan, H., and Marmorstein, R. (2013). Biochemistry. Red wine, toast of the town (again). Science 339, 1156–1157.

A journal article with 3 authors

London, A. J., Kimmelman, J., and Emborg, M. E. (2010). Research ethics. Beyond access vs. protection in trials of innovative therapies. Science 328, 829–830.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Hosoi, T., Honda, M., Oba, T., and Ozawa, K. (2013). ER stress upregulated PGE₂/IFNγ-induced IL-6 expression and down-regulated iNOS expression in glial cells. Sci. Rep. 3, 3388.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Klepinger, L. L. (2006). Fundamentals of Forensic Anthropology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Michalos, A. C. ed. (2005). Citation Classics from Social Indicators Research: The Most Cited Articles Edited and Introduced by Alex C. Michalos. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Sunderland, N., Kendall, E., Marshall, C. A., and Barlow, L. (2016). “I’ll Paint you a Picture and You’ll Hear my Story: Broadening the Scope of Narrative Research for Arts-Based Service Learning,” in Engaging First Peoples in Arts-Based Service Learning: Towards Respectful and Mutually Beneficial Educational Practices, eds. B.-L. Bartleet, D. Bennett, A. Power, and N. Sunderland (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 71–81.

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

Luntz, S. (2015). Oldest Known Stone Tools Discovered In Kenya. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/technology/stone-tools-shatter-age-record/ (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 (2016). Railroad Financing: Stakeholders’ Views on Recent Changes to the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing Program. 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

Patel, D. S. (2017). GoSchoolPro: A Web Portal for the Students Using MVC Architecture and ASP.NET Framework. Long Beach, CA: 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

Kishkovsky, S. (2015). Filmmaker From Ukraine Sent to Prison by Russians. New York Times, A6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Thomas, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Thomas, 2011; Yuan and Marmorstein, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Yuan and Marmorstein, 2013)
Three or more authors: (Hosoi et al., 2013)

About the journal

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