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

Pockley, P. (2001). Gene screens for nuclear veterans. Nature 412, 5.

A journal article with 2 authors

Claustre, H., and Maritorena, S. (2003). Ocean science. The many shades of ocean blue. Science 302, 1514–1515.

A journal article with 3 authors

Grant, A. N., Brönnimann, S., and Haimberger, L. (2008). Recent Arctic warming vertical structure contested. Nature 455, E2-3; discussion E4-5.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Molnár, F., Jr, Derzsy, N., Czabarka, É., Székely, L., Szymanski, B. K., and Korniss, G. (2014). Dominating scale-free networks using generalized probabilistic methods. Sci. Rep. 4, 6308.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Li, F. (2006). Developing Chemical Information Systems. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Baldini, F., D’Amico, A., Di Natale, C., Siciliano, P., Seeber, R., De Stefano, L., et al. eds. (2014). Sensors: Proceedings of the First National Conference on Sensors, Rome 15-17 February, 2012. New York, NY: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Larcher, R., Priami, C., and Romanel, A. (2010). “Modelling Self-assembly in BlenX,” in Transactions on Computational Systems Biology XII: Special Issue on Modeling Methodologies Lecture Notes in Computer Science., eds. C. Priami, R. Breitling, D. Gilbert, M. Heiner, and A. M. Uhrmacher (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 163–198.

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

Andrew, D. (2016). Not all Processed Meats Carry The Same Cancer Risk. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/not-all-processed-meats-carry-the-same-cancer-risk/ [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 (1996). Weather Forecasting: Recommendations to Address New Weather Processing System Development Risks. 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

Alajmi, H. (2012). Pre-Islamic Poetry and Speech Act Theory: Al-A`shá, Bishr ibn Abī Khāzim, and al-Hujayjah.

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

Wagner, J. (2017). The Mets Find Progress, And Hope for Montero, In a Sweep of the Giants. New York Times, D2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Pockley, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Pockley, 2001; Claustre and Maritorena, 2003).

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

Two authors: (Claustre and Maritorena, 2003)
Three or more authors: (Molnár et al., 2014)

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

Research and Writing Guides