How to format your references using the Frontiers in Materials citation style

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

Moore, D. D. (2007). Physiology. Sister act. Science 316, 1436–1438.

A journal article with 2 authors

Reik, W., and Dean, W. (2002). Back to the beginning. Nature 420, 127.

A journal article with 3 authors

Royer, D. L., Osborne, C. P., and Beerling, D. J. (2003). Carbon loss by deciduous trees in a CO2-rich ancient polar environment. Nature 424, 60–62.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Jördens, R., Strohmaier, N., Günter, K., Moritz, H., and Esslinger, T. (2008). A Mott insulator of fermionic atoms in an optical lattice. Nature 455, 204–207.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Reay, D. (2012). Digital Signal Processing and Applications with the OMAP-L138 eXperimenter. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Giannoudis, P. V. ed. (2012). Practical Procedures in Elective Orthopedic Surgery: Upper Extremity and Spine. London: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Öchsner, A., and Öchsner, M. (2016). “Timoshenko Beams,” in The Finite Element Analysis Program MSC Marc/Mentat: A First Introduction, ed. M. Öchsner (Singapore: Springer), 57–65.

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 Materials.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014). Conjoined gray whale calves discovered off the coast of Mexico. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/conjoined-gray-whale-calves-discovered-coast-mexico/ (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 (1977). Security of Computer Systems. 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

Hawkins, A. J. (2013). Measurement of the spacial distribution of heat exchange in a geothermal analog bedrock site using fiber-otic distributed temperature sensing. 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

Lee, L. (2012). Adjusting a Waistline for a Wedding, but at What Cost? New York Times, ST19.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Moore, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Reik and Dean, 2002; Moore, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Reik and Dean, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Jördens et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Materials
Abbreviation	Front. Mater.
ISSN (online)	2296-8016
Scope