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

Saper, C. B. (2006). Biomedicine. Life, the universe, and body temperature. Science 314, 773–774.

A journal article with 2 authors

Youngs, H., and Somerville, C. (2014). Plant science. Best practices for biofuels. Science 344, 1095–1096.

A journal article with 3 authors

Fraser, C. M., Eisen, J. A., and Salzberg, S. L. (2000). Microbial genome sequencing. Nature 406, 799–803.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Mekhail, K., Seebacher, J., Gygi, S. P., and Moazed, D. (2008). Role for perinuclear chromosome tethering in maintenance of genome stability. Nature 456, 667–670.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Afoakwa, E. O. (2016). Chocolate Science and Technology. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Bader, D. A., Parashar, M., Sridhar, V., and Prasanna, V. K. eds. (2005). High Performance Computing – HiPC 2005: 12th International Conference, Goa, India, December 18-21, 2005. Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Dominguez, K., Arca, C. D. R., and Ward, W. S. (2011). “The Relationship Between Chromatin Structure and DNA Damage in Mammalian Spermatozoa,” in Sperm Chromatin: Biological and Clinical Applications in Male Infertility and Assisted Reproduction, eds. A. Zini and A. Agarwal (New York, NY: Springer), 61–68.

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

Andrews, R. (2016). The Human Heart Begins Beating Just 16 Days After Conception. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/human-heart-begins-beating-just-16-days-after-conception/ (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 (1991). Bridge Infrastructure: Matching the Resources to the Need. 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

Sorensen, T. R. (2010). The Use of Classroom Walk-Through Observations as a Strategy to Improve Teaching and Learning: A Student Centered Perspective. St. Charles, MO: Lindenwood 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

Feeney, K. (2007). Cellphone Aside, Step Up for Soup. New York Times, NJ6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Saper, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Saper, 2006; Youngs and Somerville, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Youngs and Somerville, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Mekhail et al., 2008)

About the journal

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