How to format your references using the Frontiers in Experimental Pharmacology and Drug Discovery citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Frontiers in Experimental Pharmacology and Drug Discovery. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Anderson, J. B. (2007). Climate change. Ice sheet stability and sea-level rise. Science 315, 1803–1804.
A journal article with 2 authors
Lazzaro, B. P., and Rolff, J. (2011). Immunology. Danger, microbes, and homeostasis. Science 332, 43–44.
A journal article with 3 authors
O’Gorman, C. M., Fuller, H. T., and Dyer, P. S. (2009). Discovery of a sexual cycle in the opportunistic fungal pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus. Nature 457, 471–474.
A journal article with 7 or more authors
Kong, H., Zhu, M., Cui, F., Wang, S., Gao, X., Lu, S., et al. (2014). Quantitative assessment of short amplicons in FFPE-derived long-chain RNA. Sci. Rep. 4, 7246.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Tran, J. (2010). The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
An edited book
Koumoto, K., and Mori, T. eds. (2013). Thermoelectric Nanomaterials: Materials Design and Applications. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Derksen, J. J. (2007). “The Lattice-Boltzmann Method for Multiphase Fluid Flow Simulations and Euler-Lagrange Large-Eddy Simulations,” in Multiphase Reacting Flows: Modelling and Simulation, eds. D. L. Marchisio and R. O. Fox (Vienna: Springer), 181–228.

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 Experimental Pharmacology and Drug Discovery.

Blog post
Andrew, D. (2015). BBC Makes A Hilarious Error In Their Coverage Of The LHC. 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 (1988). Army Transportation: Alleged Overcharges on Rail Shipments to and From Ft. Irwin, California. 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
Kim, C. S. (2017). Electronic Transport of Thin Crystals in Ruthenium Chloride. Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach.

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
Baker, L. (2007). Near Seattle, Tribal Casinos Lead to Even Bigger Bets. New York Times, C6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Anderson, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Anderson, 2007; Lazzaro and Rolff, 2011).

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

  • Two authors: (Lazzaro and Rolff, 2011)
  • Three or more authors: (Kong et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleFrontiers in Experimental Pharmacology and Drug Discovery
AbbreviationFront. Pharmacol.
ISSN (online)1663-9812
ScopePharmacology (medical)
Pharmacology

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