How to format your references using the Frontiers in Mechanical Engineering citation style

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

Figer, D. F. (2005). An upper limit to the masses of stars. Nature 434, 192–194.

A journal article with 2 authors

Edwards, M., and Richardson, A. J. (2004). Impact of climate change on marine pelagic phenology and trophic mismatch. Nature 430, 881–884.

A journal article with 3 authors

Miller, R. F., Cloutier, R., and Turner, S. (2003). The oldest articulated chondrichthyan from the Early Devonian period. Nature 425, 501–504.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Cao, Y., Jin, X., Huang, H., Derebe, M. G., Levin, E. J., Kabaleeswaran, V., et al. (2011). Crystal structure of a potassium ion transporter, TrkH. Nature 471, 336–340.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Habart-Corlosquet, M., Janssen, J., and Manca, R. (2013). VaR Methodology for Non-Gaussian Finance. Hoboken, NJ USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Jing, X. (2015). Frequency Domain Analysis and Design of Nonlinear Systems based on Volterra Series Expansion: A Parametric Characteristic Approach., ed. Z. Lang. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Basu, D., and Miroshnik, V. (2016). “Chilean Revolution,” in Structural Revolution in International Business Architecture: Political Economy: Volume 2, ed. V. Miroshnik (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK), 41–49.

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 Mechanical Engineering.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). Researchers Narrow In On Common Cystic Fibrosis Infection. 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 (1980). Review of the District of Columbia’s Automatic Data Processing Operations. 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

Nolan, S. A. (2010). Ecopoetry and ecocentrism: The poetics of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. 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

Mueller, B., and Baker, A. L. (2016). A Mother Slain on a Playground, a Sea of Witnesses Gone Silent. New York Times, A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Figer, 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Edwards and Richardson, 2004; Figer, 2005).

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

Two authors: (Edwards and Richardson, 2004)
Three or more authors: (Cao et al., 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Mechanical Engineering
Abbreviation	Front. Mech. Eng.
ISSN (online)	2297-3079
Scope