How to format your references using the Frontiers in B Cell Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Frontiers in B Cell Biology. 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

Irvine, R. (2007). Cell signaling. The art of the soluble. Science 316, 845–846.

A journal article with 2 authors

Balazs, A. C., and Epstein, I. R. (2009). Chemistry. Emergent or just complex? Science 325, 1632–1634.

A journal article with 3 authors

Grosenick, L., Clement, T. S., and Fernald, R. D. (2007). Fish can infer social rank by observation alone. Nature 445, 429–432.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Meyer, J., Kidambi, P. R., Bayer, B. C., Weijtens, C., Kuhn, A., Centeno, A., et al. (2014). Metal oxide induced charge transfer doping and band alignment of graphene electrodes for efficient organic light emitting diodes. Sci. Rep. 4, 5380.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Morgan, A. (2009). Eating the Big Fish. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Dovier, A., and Pontelli, E. eds. (2010). A 25-Year Perspective on Logic Programming: Achievements of the Italian Association for Logic Programming, GULP. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Naheedy, J. H., and Mafee, M. F. (2008). “Imaging Diagnosis of the Optic Nerve Sheath Meningioma,” in Primary Optic Nerve Sheath Meningioma, eds. B. Jeremic and S. Pitz (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 39–53.

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 B Cell Biology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). We Should Not Dismiss The Dangers Of ‘Killer Robots’ So Quickly. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/technology/we-should-not-dismiss-dangers-killer-robots-so-quickly/ (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 (1979). The Federal Weather Program Must Have Stronger Central Direction. 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

Stefanek, A. (2019). Quantitative Purchasing Structure for Ferrous Scrap. Washington, DC: George Washington University.

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

Corkery, M., and Walsh, M. W. (2015). Treasury Considers Plan to Help Puerto Rico. New York Times, B1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Irvine, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Irvine, 2007; Balazs and Epstein, 2009).

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

Two authors: (Balazs and Epstein, 2009)
Three or more authors: (Meyer et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in B Cell Biology
Abbreviation	Front. Immunol.
ISSN (online)	1664-3224
Scope