How to format your references using the Frontiers in Microbial Immunology citation style

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

Boyle, J. (2013). Biology must develop its own big-data systems. Nature 499, 7.

A journal article with 2 authors

Peel, M. C., and McMahon, T. A. (2006). Continental runoff: a quality-controlled global runoff data set. Nature 444, E14; discussion E14-5.

A journal article with 3 authors

Liu, J., Gong, P., and Zhou, X. (2014). The association between romantic relationship status and 5-HT1A gene in young adults. Sci. Rep. 4, 7049.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Diaz-Herraiz, M., Jurado, V., Cuezva, S., Laiz, L., Pallecchi, P., Tiano, P., et al. (2014). Deterioration of an Etruscan tomb by bacteria from the order Rhizobiales. Sci. Rep. 4, 3610.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Pascoe, N. (2011). Reliability Technology. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Hakeem, K. R., Jawaid, M., and Y. Alothman, O. eds. (2015). Agricultural Biomass Based Potential Materials. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Johnson, M. H. (2008). “Making a Home: Archaeologies of the Medieval English Village,” in Evaluating Multiple Narratives: Beyond Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist Archaeologies, eds. J. Habu, C. Fawcett, and J. M. Matsunaga (New York, NY: Springer), 45–55.

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 Microbial Immunology.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2014). Ancient Reptilian Sea Monster Also Took To Land. 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 (2016). Information Technology: FEMA Needs to Address Management Weaknesses to Improve Its 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

Burke, D. M. (2014). Enhancing the patient safety culture of ABSN students through instruction on medical error recovery.

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

Koblin, J. (2017). After Search Of 5 Months, CBS Names New Anchor. New York Times, B4.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Boyle, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Peel and McMahon, 2006; Boyle, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Peel and McMahon, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Diaz-Herraiz et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Microbial Immunology
Abbreviation	Front. Immunol.
ISSN (online)	1664-3224
Scope

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