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

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

Sisodia, S. S. (2002). Biomedicine. A cargo receptor mystery APParently solved? Science 295, 805–807.

A journal article with 2 authors

Barkana, R., and Loeb, A. (2003). Spectral signature of cosmological infall of gas around the first quasars. Nature 421, 341–343.

A journal article with 3 authors

Stern, M., Umansky, V., and Bar-Joseph, I. (2014). Exciton liquid in coupled quantum wells. Science 343, 55–57.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Zhang, Y., Blattman, J. N., Kennedy, N. J., Duong, J., Nguyen, T., Wang, Y., et al. (2004). Regulation of innate and adaptive immune responses by MAP kinase phosphatase 5. Nature 430, 793–797.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Barker, R. M., and Puckett, J. A. (2013). Design of Highway Bridges. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Angelini, C., Rancoita, P. M. V., and Rovetta, S. eds. (2016). Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics: 12th International Meeting, CIBB 2015, Naples, Italy, September 10-12, 2015, Revised Selected Papers. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Buchan, S. (2012). “Through Music to Postgraduate Study,” in Reflections on Learning, Life and Work: Completing Doctoral Studies in Mid and Later Life and Career, ed. M. Ryan (Rotterdam: SensePublishers), 53–65.

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 Microbiology.

Blog post

Taub, B. (2016). Who Killed Ötzi The Iceman 5,300 Years Ago? IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/who-killed-tzi-the-iceman-5300-years-ago/ (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 (2014). Consumers’ Location Data: Companies Take Steps to Protect Privacy, but Practices Are Inconsistent, and Risks May Not be Clear to Consumers. 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

Gilman, D. G. (2013). Comparative analysis of corporate culture in a multinational organization. Malibu, CA: Pepperdine University.

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

Hodara, S. (2015). Before YouTube, Experimenting With Video. New York Times, WE10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sisodia, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Sisodia, 2002; Barkana and Loeb, 2003).

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

Two authors: (Barkana and Loeb, 2003)
Three or more authors: (Zhang et al., 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Microbiology
Abbreviation	Front. Microbiol.
ISSN (online)	1664-302X
Scope	Microbiology Microbiology (medical)