How to format your references using the Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience citation style

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

Regalbuto, J. R. (2009). Engineering. Cellulosic biofuels--got gasoline? Science 325, 822–824.

A journal article with 2 authors

Trinkle, D. R., and Woodward, C. (2005). The chemistry of deformation: how solutes soften pure metals. Science 310, 1665–1667.

A journal article with 3 authors

Thornton, J. W., Need, E., and Crews, D. (2003). Resurrecting the ancestral steroid receptor: ancient origin of estrogen signaling. Science 301, 1714–1717.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Cusanovich, D. A., Reddington, J. P., Garfield, D. A., Daza, R. M., Aghamirzaie, D., Marco-Ferreres, R., et al. (2018). The cis-regulatory dynamics of embryonic development at single-cell resolution. Nature 555, 538–542.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Gordon, M. J., Jr. (2010). Total Quality Process Control for Injection Molding. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Bhangal, S. (2006). Foundation Flash 8., ed. K. Besley. Berkeley, CA: Apress.

A chapter in an edited book

Koriche, F. (2008). “Learning to Assign Degrees of Belief in Relational Domains,” in Inductive Logic Programming: 17th International Conference, ILP 2007, Corvallis, OR, USA, June 19-21, 2007, Revised Selected Papers, eds. H. Blockeel, J. Ramon, J. Shavlik, and P. Tadepalli (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 25–26.

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 Behavioral Neuroscience.

Blog post

Carpineti, A. (2017). Scientists Use Snail Genomics To Fight Deadly Parasitic Disease. IFLScience.

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 (1978). Comments on Legislation To Establish a Department of Education. 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

Waugh, D. L. (2012). From forgotten to remembered: The long process of school desegregation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Prince Edward County, Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina.

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

Rothenberg, B. (2017). Back in Baltimore, Anthony Decides to Speak, but Doesn’t Say Much. New York Times, B13.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Regalbuto, 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Trinkle and Woodward, 2005; Regalbuto, 2009).

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

Two authors: (Trinkle and Woodward, 2005)
Three or more authors: (Cusanovich et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
Abbreviation	Front. Behav. Neurosci.
ISSN (online)	1662-5153
Scope	Behavioral Neuroscience Cognitive Neuroscience Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology