How to format your references using the Frontiers in Comparative Psychology citation style

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

Perk, J. (2013). Perspective: The power of disease prevention. Nature 493, S6.

A journal article with 2 authors

Martin, T. J., and Mundy, G. R. (2007). Bone metastasis: can osteoclasts be excluded? Nature 445, E19; discussion E19-20.

A journal article with 3 authors

Fonseca, P. J., Münch, D., and Hennig, R. M. (2000). How cicadas interpret acoustic signals. Nature 405, 297–298.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Xiang, S., Cooper-Morgan, A., Jiao, X., Kiledjian, M., Manley, J. L., and Tong, L. (2009). Structure and function of the 5’-->3’ exoribonuclease Rat1 and its activating partner Rai1. Nature 458, 784–788.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Nappi, E., and Peskov, V. (2013). Imaging Gaseous Detectors and Their Applications. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

Jordan, R. ed. (2006). Surface-Initiated Polymerization II. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Chow, B. H. (2013). “The Virtual-Reality Campuses Project,” in 3D Immersive and Interactive Learning, ed. Y. Cai (Singapore: Springer), 59–70.

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 Comparative Psychology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). The Keystone XL Pipeline Debate Is Over, But Our Infrastructure Needs Are Not. 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 (1973). Possible Extended Use of the Federal Telecommunications System by DOD. 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

Prochorchik, V. L. (2010). Increasing infant mental health awareness.

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

Kanter, J. (2017). U.S. Briefs E.U. on Fears Over Laptops on Flights. New York Times, A17.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Perk, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Martin and Mundy, 2007; Perk, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Martin and Mundy, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Xiang et al., 2009)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Comparative Psychology
Abbreviation	Front. Psychol.
ISSN (online)	1664-1078
Scope	General Psychology