How to format your references using the Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences citation style

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

Balch, J. K. (2014). Atmospheric science: drought and fire change sink to source. Nature 506, 41–42.

A journal article with 2 authors

Maherali, H., and Klironomos, J. N. (2007). Influence of phylogeny on fungal community assembly and ecosystem functioning. Science 316, 1746–1748.

A journal article with 3 authors

Corezzi, S., Fioretto, D., and Rolla, P. (2002). Bond-controlled configurational entropy reduction in chemical vitrification. Nature 420, 653–656.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Wang, F., Cheng, K., Wei, X., Qin, H., Chen, R., Liu, J., et al. (2013). A six-plex proteome quantification strategy reveals the dynamics of protein turnover. Sci. Rep. 3, 1827.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

van Helvoort, H. (2005). Next Generation SDH/SONET. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Hoballah, J. J., and Lumsden, A. B. eds. (2012). Vascular Surgery. London: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Nasdala, L., Beyssac, O., William Schopf, J., and Bleisteiner, B. (2012). “Application of Raman-based images in the Earth sciences,” in Raman Imaging: Techniques and Applications, ed. A. Zoubir (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 145–187.

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 Biosciences.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2013). Playing Video Games Can Boost Brain Volume. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/brain/playing-video-games-can-boost-brain-volume/ (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 (2004). Project SAFECOM: Key Cross-Agency Emergency Communications Effort Requires Stronger Collaboration. 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

Vargas, A. R. (2010). Implementing modern geographic technology in the trucking industry: A case study. 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

Rohan, T. (2015). Head Games. New York Times, B15.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Balch, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Maherali and Klironomos, 2007; Balch, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Maherali and Klironomos, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Wang et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences
Abbreviation	Front. Mol. Biosci.
ISSN (online)	2296-889X
Scope