How to format your references using the Frontiers in Education citation style

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

Chin, J. W. (2009). Journal club. A molecular biologist gets excited about making designer proteins in cells. Nature 457, 239.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kennedy, B. M., and van Soest, M. C. (2007). Flow of mantle fluids through the ductile lower crust: helium isotope trends. Science 318, 1433–1436.

A journal article with 3 authors

Woodward, J. J., Iavarone, A. T., and Portnoy, D. A. (2010). c-di-AMP secreted by intracellular Listeria monocytogenes activates a host type I interferon response. Science 328, 1703–1705.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Prochnik, S. E., Umen, J., Nedelcu, A. M., Hallmann, A., Miller, S. M., Nishii, I., et al. (2010). Genomic analysis of organismal complexity in the multicellular green alga Volvox carteri. Science 329, 223–226.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hunt, P. J., and Kennedy, J. E. (2005). Financial Derivatives in Theory and Practice: Hunt/Financial Derivatives. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Nerem, R. M., Loring, J., McDevitt, T. C., Palecek, S. P., Schaffer, D. V., and Zandstra, P. W. eds. (2014). Stem Cell Engineering: A WTEC Global Assessment. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Gelmetti, C. (2015). “La dermatologia e la venereologia del secolo XVIII,” in Storia della Dermatologia e della Venereologia in Italia, ed. C. Gelmetti (Milano: Springer), 75–101.

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 Education.

Blog post

Carpineti, A. (2016). More Than Thirty Unreported Sources Of Toxic Air Discovered From Space. 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 (2014). James Webb Space Telescope: Project Meeting Commitments but Current Technical, Cost, and Schedule Challenges Could Affect Continued Progress. 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

Bryant, D. (2012). A good story changes everything. Malibu, CA: Pepperdine University.

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

Saslow, L. (2008). On the Beach, the Yoga Poses Really Flow. New York Times, LI2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Chin, 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Kennedy and van Soest, 2007; Chin, 2009).

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

Two authors: (Kennedy and van Soest, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Prochnik et al., 2010)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Education
Abbreviation	Front. Educ.
ISSN (online)	2504-284X
Scope