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:

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

Baker, D. F. (2007). Climate change. Reassessing carbon sinks. Science 316, 1708–1709.

A journal article with 2 authors

Wyithe, J. S. B., and Loeb, A. (2002). Magnification of light from many distant quasars by gravitational lenses. Nature 417, 923–925.

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang, A., Sun, H., and Wang, X. (2014). Urinary metabolic profiling of rat models revealed protective function of scoparone against alcohol induced hepatotoxicity. Sci. Rep. 4, 6768.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Godinho, R. M. da C., Crestani, J., Kmetzsch, L., Araujo, G. de S., Frases, S., Staats, C. C., et al. (2014). The vacuolar-sorting protein Snf7 is required for export of virulence determinants in members of the Cryptococcus neoformans complex. Sci. Rep. 4, 6198.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bakker, J., and Clarke, R. J. (2011). Wine Flavour Chemistry. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Kumar, P., Gupta, V. K., Tiwari, A. K., and Kamle, M. eds. (2016). Current Trends in Plant Disease Diagnostics and Management Practices. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Mishkin, D., and Matas, J. (2014). “Matching of Images of Non-planar Objects with View Synthesis,” in SOFSEM 2014: Theory and Practice of Computer Science: 40th International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science, Nový Smokovec, Slovakia, January 26-29, 2014, Proceedings, eds. V. Geffert, B. Preneel, B. Rovan, J. Štuller, and A. M. Tjoa (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 30–39.

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, E. (2015). Can Gene Editing Provide a Solution to Global Hunger? IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/can-gene-editing-provide-solution-global-hunger/ (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 (1978). The Johnstown Area Flood of 1977: A Case Study for the Future. 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

Grefe, S. E. (2013). Plasmonic and topological insulator nanostructures and metamaterials nanoscale near-field investigations: Experiment and theory. 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

James, S. (2017). Take Your Baby to Work. New York Times, SR8.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Baker, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Wyithe and Loeb, 2002; Baker, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Wyithe and Loeb, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Godinho et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Experimental Pharmacology and Drug Discovery
Abbreviation	Front. Pharmacol.
ISSN (online)	1663-9812
Scope	Pharmacology (medical) Pharmacology