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

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

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Christe, K. O. (2008). Obituary: Neil Bartlett (1932-2008). Nature 455, 182.
A journal article with 2 authors
Bainer, R., and Weaver, V. (2013). Cell biology. Strength under tension. Science 341, 965–966.
A journal article with 3 authors
Jin, F.-F., Boucharel, J., and Lin, I.-I. (2014). Eastern Pacific tropical cyclones intensified by El Niño delivery of subsurface ocean heat. Nature 516, 82–85.
A journal article with 7 or more authors
Chakrabarti, R., Celià-Terrassa, T., Kumar, S., Hang, X., Wei, Y., Choudhury, A., et al. (2018). Notch ligand Dll1 mediates cross-talk between mammary stem cells and the macrophageal niche. Science 360.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Eisner, H. (2005). Managing Complex Systems. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Bertau, M., Offermanns, H., Plass, L., Schmidt, F., and Wernicke, H.-J. eds. (2014). Methanol: The Basic Chemical and Energy Feedstock of the Future: Asinger’s Vision Today. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Winzer, T., Malić, E., and Knorr, A. (2013). “Graphene Bloch Equations,” in Low-Dimensional Functional Materials, eds. R. Egger, D. Matrasulov, and K. Rakhimov (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands), 35–61.

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 Cellular Neuroscience.

Blog post
Andrew, E. (2014). First Vine From Space Uploaded By NASA Astronaut. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/first-vine-space-uploaded-nasa-astronaut/ (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 (1981). Non-Federal Computer Acquisition Practices Provide Useful Information for Streamlining Federal Methods. 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
Koenig, W. E. (2010). Leadership for the whole in the mythic field of C. G. Jung’s unconscious processes. Carpinteria, CA: Pacifica Graduate Institute.

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
Sisario, B. (2016). Dylan and the Nobel: It Gets Weirder. New York Times, C3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Christe, 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Christe, 2008; Bainer and Weaver, 2013).

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

  • Two authors: (Bainer and Weaver, 2013)
  • Three or more authors: (Chakrabarti et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal titleFrontiers in Cellular Neuroscience
AbbreviationFront. Cell. Neurosci.
ISSN (online)1662-5102
ScopeCellular and Molecular Neuroscience

Other styles