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

Gittis, A. (2012). Eppendorf finalist. Striatal interneurons: causes of or cures for movement disorders? Science 338, 59.

A journal article with 2 authors

Brochard-Wyart, F., and de Gennes, P. G. (2003). Physics. How soft skin wrinkles. Science 300, 441.

A journal article with 3 authors

Machens, C. K., Romo, R., and Brody, C. D. (2005). Flexible control of mutual inhibition: a neural model of two-interval discrimination. Science 307, 1121–1124.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

D’Autréaux, B., Tucker, N. P., Dixon, R., and Spiro, S. (2005). A non-haem iron centre in the transcription factor NorR senses nitric oxide. Nature 437, 769–772.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Jeong, H. (2014). Architectures for Computer Vision. Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Hervás, R., Lee, S., Nugent, C., and Bravo, J. eds. (2014). Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence. Personalisation and User Adapted Services: 8th International Conference, UCAmI 2014, Belfast, UK, December 2-5, 2014. Proceedings. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Downs, M., and Jones, G. A. (2016). “Möbius Inversion in Suzuki Groups and Enumeration of Regular Objects,” in Symmetries in Graphs, Maps, and Polytopes: 5th SIGMAP Workshop, West Malvern, UK, July 2014 Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics., eds. J. Širáň and R. Jajcay (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 97–127.

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. (2015). Alcoholism Treatment May Bring HIV Out Of Hiding. 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). Corps of Engineers: Effects of Restrictions on Corps’ Hopper Dredges Should Be Comprehensively Analyzed. 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

Allen, M. W. (2017). Popular Culture and War in the Vietnam Era.

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

Kaufman, M. T. (2017). Lillian Ross Dies at 99; A New Yorker Reporter Whose Memoir Rankled. New York Times, A25.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gittis, 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Brochard-Wyart and de Gennes, 2003; Gittis, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Brochard-Wyart and de Gennes, 2003)
Three or more authors: (D’Autréaux et al., 2005)

About the journal

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

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