How to format your references using the Frontiers in Cancer Molecular Targets and Therapeutics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Frontiers in Cancer Molecular Targets and Therapeutics. 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

Crow, M. M. (2013). Digital learning: look, then leap. Nature 499, 275–277.

A journal article with 2 authors

Hivon, E., and Kamionkowski, M. (2002). Cosmology. A new window to the early universe. Science 298, 1349–1350.

A journal article with 3 authors

Hayes, D., Griffin, G. B., and Engel, G. S. (2013). Engineering coherence among excited states in synthetic heterodimer systems. Science 340, 1431–1434.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Chuai, X., Huang, X., Wang, W., Wu, C., and Zhao, R. (2014). Spatial simulation of land use based on terrestrial ecosystem carbon storage in coastal Jiangsu, China. Sci. Rep. 4, 5667.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Anderson, J. C., and Naeim, F. (2012). Basic Structural Dynamics. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

De Meester, F., Zibadi, S., and Watson, R. R. eds. (2010). Modern Dietary Fat Intakes in Disease Promotion. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press.

A chapter in an edited book

Le Naour, C., Hoffman, D. C., and Trubert, D. (2014). “Fundamental and Experimental Aspects of Single Atom-at-a-Time Chemistry,” in The Chemistry of Superheavy Elements, eds. M. Schädel and D. Shaughnessy (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 241–260.

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 Cancer Molecular Targets and Therapeutics.

Blog post

Davis, J. (2015). Sexual Preference In Rats Influenced By Oxytocin And Dopamine. 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 (2003). District of Columbia: Performance Report Shows Continued Progress. 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

Lim, T. (2017). Information-Theoretic Aspects of Signal Analysis and Reconstruction. La Jolla, CA: University of California San Diego.

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

Feeney, K. (2011). From the Sea to Your Plate. New York Times, NJ10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Crow, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Hivon and Kamionkowski, 2002; Crow, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Hivon and Kamionkowski, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Chuai et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Cancer Molecular Targets and Therapeutics
Abbreviation	Front. Oncol.
ISSN (online)	2234-943X
Scope	Cancer Research Oncology