How to format your references using the Frontiers in Earth Science citation style

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

Sambridge, M. (2003). Geophysics. An ensemble view of Earth’s inner core. Science 299, 529–530.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gillon, J., and Yakir, D. (2001). Influence of carbonic anhydrase activity in terrestrial vegetation on the 18O content of atmospheric CO2. Science 291, 2584–2587.

A journal article with 3 authors

Staal, M., Meysman, F. J. R., and Stal, L. J. (2003). Temperature excludes N2-fixing heterocystous cyanobacteria in the tropical oceans. Nature 425, 504–507.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Goyon, J., Colin, A., Ovarlez, G., Ajdari, A., and Bocquet, L. (2008). Spatial cooperativity in soft glassy flows. Nature 454, 84–87.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Rushton, A. (2011). VHDL for Logic Synthesis. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Campbell, G. ed. (2016). Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

O’Donoghue, T., and Harford, J. (2016). “Secondary School Education in Other Catholic Boys’ Secondary Schools in Ireland, 1922–1962,” in Secondary School Education in Ireland: History, Memories and Life Stories, 1922–1967, ed. J. Harford (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK), 87–119.

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 Earth Science.

Blog post

Carpineti, A. (2016). New Extremely Red Quasar Population Is Something Never Seen Before. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/new-extremely-red-quasar-population-is-something-never-seen-before/ (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 (1994). Use of Corps Electronic Signature System. 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

Sullivan, T. J. (2017). Molecular Ecology, Disease Ecology, and Candidate Genes for Pathogen Resistance in the Blue Crab Callinectes sapidus. Lafayette, LA: University of Louisiana.

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

Bogle, J. C. (2017). Putting Clients Second. New York Times, A27.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sambridge, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Gillon and Yakir, 2001; Sambridge, 2003).

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

Two authors: (Gillon and Yakir, 2001)
Three or more authors: (Goyon et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Earth Science
Abbreviation	Front. Earth Sci.
ISSN (online)	2296-6463
Scope