How to format your references using the Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology citation style

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

Gewin, V. (2004). Mapping opportunities. Nature 427, 376–377.

A journal article with 2 authors

Saavedra, S., and Stouffer, D. B. (2013). “Disentangling nestedness” disentangled. Nature 500, E1-2.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bridgham, J. T., Ortlund, E. A., and Thornton, J. W. (2009). An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution. Nature 461, 515–519.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Song, X., Peng, C., Zhou, G., Jiang, H., and Wang, W. (2014). Chinese Grain for Green Program led to highly increased soil organic carbon levels: a meta-analysis. Sci. Rep. 4, 4460.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Schulman, F. Y. (2016). Veterinarian’s Guide to Maximizing Biopsy Results. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Gent, I. P. ed. (2009). Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming - CP 2009: 15th International Conference, CP 2009 Lisbon, Portugal, September 20-24, 2009 Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Janaki, S. S., and Ebenezer, D. (2006). “A Blur Reducing Adaptive Filter for the Removal of Mixed Noise in Images,” in Advances in Computer, Information, and Systems Sciences, and Engineering: Proceedings of IETA 2005, TeNe 2005, EIAE 2005, eds. K. Elleithy, T. Sobh, A. Mahmood, M. Iskander, and M. Karim (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands), 26–30.

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 Bioengineering and Biotechnology.

Blog post

Carpineti, A. (2016). Ice Deposit As Big As Lake Superior Found On Mars. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/ice-deposit-as-big-as-lake-superior-found-on-mars/ [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 (1973). Effectiveness and Administration of the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education 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

Dashevsky-Kerdman, I. (2009). The meeting of one hundred ways.

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

Dominus, S. (2017). A Dramatist as Dungeon Master. New York Times, C1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gewin, 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Gewin, 2004; Saavedra and Stouffer, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Saavedra and Stouffer, 2013)
Three or more authors: (Song et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology
Abbreviation	Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
ISSN (online)	2296-4185
Scope	Biotechnology Bioengineering Biomedical Engineering Histology

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