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

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

Cyranoski, D. (2008). Singapore surges upwards. Nature 455, 1144–1146.

A journal article with 2 authors

Divakaruni, A. S., and Murphy, A. N. (2012). Cell biology. A mitochondrial mystery, solved. Science 337, 41–43.

A journal article with 3 authors

Jewitt, D., Aussel, H., and Evans, A. (2001). The size and albedo of the Kuiper-belt object (20000) Varuna. Nature 411, 446–447.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Gu, Z., Steinmetz, L. M., Gu, X., Scharfe, C., Davis, R. W., and Li, W.-H. (2003). Role of duplicate genes in genetic robustness against null mutations. Nature 421, 63–66.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bowling, J. (2011). Diagnostic Dermoscopy. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Erdmann, V. A., and Barciszewski, J. eds. (2010). RNA Technologies and Their Applications. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Boucher, J.-P., Denuit, M., and Guillén, M. (2008). “Modelling of Insurance Claim Count with Hurdle Distribution for Panel Data,” in Advances in Mathematical and Statistical Modeling, eds. R. Minguez, J.-M. Sarabia, N. Balakrishnan, and B. C. Arnold (Boston, MA: Birkhäuser), 45–59.

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 Chemistry.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014). Astronomers directly image a filament of the “cosmic web” for the first time. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/astronomers-directly-image-filament-“cosmic-web”-first-time/ (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 (1984). Review of the National Center for Research in Vocational Education. 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

Dixon, L. K. (2009). Tracing anthropogenic wastes: Detection of fluorescent optical brighteners in a gradient of natural organic matter fluorescence. Tampa, FL: University of South Florida.

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. (2007). Justices Hear Arguments About Pacts On Pricing. 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 (Cyranoski, 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Cyranoski, 2008; Divakaruni and Murphy, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Divakaruni and Murphy, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Gu et al., 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Chemistry
Abbreviation	Front. Chem.
ISSN (online)	2296-2646
Scope	General Chemistry