How to format your references using the Frontiers in Bioscience citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Frontiers in Bioscience (FBS). 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	Download the output style file
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

1. JE Cohen. Human population: the next half century. Science 302, 1172–1175 (2003)

A journal article with 2 authors

1. A Hellman; A Chess. Gene body-specific methylation on the active X chromosome. Science 315, 1141–1143 (2007)

A journal article with 3 authors

1. AS Nateri; B Spencer-Dene; A Behrens. Interaction of phosphorylated c-Jun with TCF4 regulates intestinal cancer development. Nature 437, 281–285 (2005)

A journal article with 4 or more authors

1. J Sibert; J Hampton; P Kleiber; M Maunder. Biomass, size, and trophic status of top predators in the Pacific Ocean. Science 314, 1773–1776 (2006)

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. E Böhmer. Dentistry in Rabbits and Rodents. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK (2015)

An edited book

1. Eds: RH Taylor; G-Z Yang. Information Processing in Computer-Assisted Interventions: Second International Conference, IPCAI 2011, Berlin, Germany, June 22, 2011. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2011)

A chapter in an edited book

1. S Andrikovics; L Forró; G Gere; G Lakatos; L Sasvári. Water bird guilds and their feeding connections in the Bodrogzug, Hungary. In: Limnology and Aquatic Birds: Proceedings of the Fourth Conference Working Group on Aquatic Birds of Societas Internationalis Limnologiae (SIL), Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, August 3–7, 2003. AR Hanson, JJ Kerekes, eds. , Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht (2006)

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 Bioscience.

Blog post

1. T Hale. Moron Shoots Cat With An Arrow In Michigan, https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/moron-shoots-cat-arrow-michigan/

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

1. Government Accountability Office. Aviation Safety: New Airlines Illustrate Long-Standing Problems in FAA’s Inspection Program. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (1996)

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

1. GM Valencia. A Phenomenological Study of Adults Earning a Graduate Degree after Age 60, (2015)

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

1. S Hodara. Art Rooted in Matters of the Heart and the Mind, (2015)

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (1).
This sentence cites two references (1, 2).
This sentence cites four references (1–4).

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Bioscience
ISSN (print)	1945-0494
ISSN (online)	1945-0508
Scope

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