How to format your references using the Frontiers in Brain Imaging Methods citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Frontiers in Brain Imaging Methods. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Smaglik, P. (2002). Boston: a magnetic hub. Nature 417, 4–5.

A journal article with 2 authors

Andreasen, R., and Sharma, M. (2009). Comment on “Neodymium-142 evidence for Hadean mafic crust.” Science 325, 267; author reply 267.

A journal article with 3 authors

Raymond, S. N., Mandell, A. M., and Sigurdsson, S. (2006). Exotic Earths: forming habitable worlds with giant planet migration. Science 313, 1413–1416.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Aach, J., Bulyk, M. L., Church, G. M., Comander, J., Derti, A., and Shendure, J. (2001). Computational comparison of two draft sequences of the human genome. Nature 409, 856–859.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Alhabeeb, M. J. (2012). Mathematical Finance. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Soares, A., Pereira, M. J., and Dimitrakopoulos, R. eds. (2008). geoENV VI – Geostatistics for Environmental Applications: Proceedings of the Sixth European Conference on Geostatistics for Environmental Applications. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Schumacher, N., Mook, S.-C., Shimanovich, I., Zillikens, D., and Schmidt, E. (2015). “Life-Threatening Pemphigus Vulgaris,” in Clinical Cases in Autoimmune Blistering Diseases, ed. D. F. Murrell (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 35–43.

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 Brain Imaging Methods.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2016). Why Do Only Some People Get ‘Skin Orgasms’ From Listening To Music? 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 (1997). Year 2000 Computing Crisis: Strong Leadership Today Needed To Prevent Future Disruption of Government Services. 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

Shah, R. A. (2010). Who am I? A biracial and interfaith woman’s perspective: A personal narrative. 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

Greenhouse, L., and Kirkpatrick, D. D. (2007). Justices Loosen Ad Restrictions In Campaign Law. New York Times, A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smaglik, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Smaglik, 2002; Andreasen and Sharma, 2009).

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

Two authors: (Andreasen and Sharma, 2009)
Three or more authors: (Aach et al., 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Brain Imaging Methods
Abbreviation	Front. Neurosci.
ISSN (online)	1662-453X
Scope	General Neuroscience