How to format your references using the Frontiers in Marine Science citation style

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

Sloan, E. D., Jr (2003). Fundamental principles and applications of natural gas hydrates. Nature 426, 353–363.

A journal article with 2 authors

Schwefel, H. G. L., and Türeci, H. E. (2015). Optics. A chaotic approach clears up imaging. Science 348, 189–190.

A journal article with 3 authors

Tarchini, B., Duboule, D., and Kmita, M. (2006). Regulatory constraints in the evolution of the tetrapod limb anterior-posterior polarity. Nature 443, 985–988.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Min, J., Jang, J., Keum, D., Ryu, S.-W., Choi, C., Jeong, K.-H., et al. (2013). Fluorescent microscopy beyond diffraction limits using speckle illumination and joint support recovery. Sci. Rep. 3, 2075.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ibe, O. C. (2011). Fundamentals of Stochastic Networks. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Eggersglüß, S. (2012). High Quality Test Pattern Generation and Boolean Satisfiability., ed. R. Drechsler. Boston, MA: Springer US.

A chapter in an edited book

Wang, S., Agrawal, D., and El Abbadi, A. (2011). “A Comprehensive Framework for Secure Query Processing on Relational Data in the Cloud,” in Secure Data Management: 8th VLDB Workshop, SDM 2011, Seattle, WA, USA, September 2, 2011, Proceedings, eds. W. Jonker and M. Petković (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 52–69.

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 Marine Science.

Blog post

Andrews, R. (2017). The Most Swear-Prone US States Are Also The Most Trustworthy. 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 (1985). Survey of Small Businesses’ Reactions to Changes in the Costs of Telephone Service. 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

Cooper, J. (2017). Numerical Modeling of Fluid Flow in a Porous Media Using Python. Lafayette, LA: University of Louisiana.

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

Pols, M. (2015). Down East Downers. New York Times, BR7.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sloan, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Sloan, 2003; Schwefel and Türeci, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Schwefel and Türeci, 2015)
Three or more authors: (Min et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Marine Science
Abbreviation	Front. Mar. Sci.
ISSN (online)	2296-7745
Scope	Aquatic Science Oceanography Ocean Engineering Global and Planetary Change Water Science and Technology