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

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

Bonan, G. B. (2008). Forests and climate change: forcings, feedbacks, and the climate benefits of forests. Science 320, 1444–1449.

A journal article with 2 authors

Halloran, M. E., and Longini, I. M., Jr (2006). Public health. Community studies for vaccinating schoolchildren against influenza. Science 311, 615–616.

A journal article with 3 authors

Coumou, D., Driesner, T., and Heinrich, C. A. (2008). The structure and dynamics of mid-ocean ridge hydrothermal systems. Science 321, 1825–1828.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Joh, N. H., Min, A., Faham, S., Whitelegge, J. P., Yang, D., Woods, V. L., et al. (2008). Modest stabilization by most hydrogen-bonded side-chain interactions in membrane proteins. Nature 453, 1266–1270.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Biegelman, M. T. (2013). Faces of Fraud. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Hurst, C. J. ed. (2016). The Rasputin Effect: When Commensals and Symbionts Become Parasitic. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Fang, A. C., and Cao, J. (2015). “Part-of-Speech Tags and ICE Text Classification,” in Text Genres and Registers: The Computation of Linguistic Features, ed. J. Cao (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 71–82.

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 Developmental Psychology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). Near Earth And Far Away, It’s Been An Exciting Year In Space. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/near-earth-and-far-away-it-s-been-exciting-year-space/ (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 (1983). Telecommunications Security and Privacy. 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

Merkurjev, D. (2015). Understanding Enhancer Role in Transcriptional Response. 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

Greenhouse, L. (2006). Supreme Court Gives Employees Broader Protection Against Retaliation in Workplace. New York Times, A22.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Bonan, 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Halloran and Longini, 2006; Bonan, 2008).

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

Two authors: (Halloran and Longini, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Joh et al., 2008)

About the journal

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