How to format your references using the Frontiers in Molecular and Cellular Oncology citation style

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

McNutt, M. (2013). Climate change impacts. Science 341, 435.

A journal article with 2 authors

Klett, E. L., and Patel, S. B. (2004). Biomedicine. Will the real cholesterol transporter please stand up. Science 303, 1149–1150.

A journal article with 3 authors

Peelen, M. V., Fei-Fei, L., and Kastner, S. (2009). Neural mechanisms of rapid natural scene categorization in human visual cortex. Nature 460, 94–97.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Davis, M. A., Chew, M. K., Hobbs, R. J., Lugo, A. E., Ewel, J. J., Vermeij, G. J., et al. (2011). Don’t judge species on their origins. Nature 474, 153–154.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chow, S.-C., and Liu, J.-P. (2005). Design and Analysis of Clinical Trials: Concepts and Methodologies. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Artho, C., and Ölveczky, P. C. eds. (2016). Formal Techniques for Safety-Critical Systems: 4th International Workshop, FTSCS 2015, Paris, France, November 6-7, 2015. Revised Selected Papers. 1st ed. 2016. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Peeters, M. (2015). “CRC Liver Metastases,” in Locoregional Tumor Therapy, eds. E. Van Cutsem, T. J. Vogl, F. Orsi, and A. Sobrero (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 55–72.

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 Molecular and Cellular Oncology.

Blog post

Hamilton, K. (2016). Chew On This: We Finally Know How Our Jaws Evolved. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/chew-on-this-we-finally-know-how-our-jaws-evolved/ [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). Information Technology: Leveraging Best Practices and Reform Initiatives Can Help Agencies Better Manage Investments. 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

Patrick, N. S. (2010). Employees’ Perceptions of Employers’ Response After Workplace Injury.

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

Novick, S. M. (2015). Farm to Blanket. New York Times, LI8.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (McNutt, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Klett and Patel, 2004; McNutt, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Klett and Patel, 2004)
Three or more authors: (Davis et al., 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Molecular and Cellular Oncology
Abbreviation	Front. Oncol.
ISSN (online)	2234-943X
Scope	Cancer Research Oncology

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