How to format your references using the Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution citation style

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

Suderow, H. J. (2015). PHYSICS. Opening the gate on superconductivity. Science 350, 1316–1317.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gerstner, W., and Naud, R. (2009). Neuroscience. How good are neuron models? Science 326, 379–380.

A journal article with 3 authors

Vivier, E., Nunès, J. A., and Vély, F. (2004). Natural killer cell signaling pathways. Science 306, 1517–1519.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Tanaka, J.-I., Horiike, Y., Matsuzaki, M., Miyazaki, T., Ellis-Davies, G. C. R., and Kasai, H. (2008). Protein synthesis and neurotrophin-dependent structural plasticity of single dendritic spines. Science 319, 1683–1687.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Iacus, S. M. (2011). Option Pricing and Estimation of Financial Models with R. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Ward, A. C. ed. (2016). STAT Inhibitors in Cancer. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Rousseaux, F., Saurel, P., and Petit, J. (2014). “Knowledge Engineering or Digital Humanities?,” in Innovations in Intelligent Machines-4: Recent Advances in Knowledge Engineering Studies in Computational Intelligence., eds. C. Faucher and L. C. Jain (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 129–187.

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 Ecology and Evolution.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). First Ever Private Launch Site for Orbital Rockets Could be in New Zealand. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/first-private-launch-site-orbital-rockets-will-be-new-zealand/ [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 (2000). GAO Report on Applying Agreed-Upon Procedures: Highway Trust Fund Excise Taxes. 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

Haghighat, R. (2015). An optimization model to allocate budget in school rehabilitation projects.

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

Hodgman, J. (2016). Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman. New York Times, MM18.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Suderow, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Gerstner and Naud, 2009; Suderow, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Gerstner and Naud, 2009)
Three or more authors: (Tanaka et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
Abbreviation	Front. Ecol. Evol.
ISSN (online)	2296-701X
Scope

Research and Writing Guides