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

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

Turner, W. (2014). Conservation. Sensing biodiversity. Science 346, 301–302.

A journal article with 2 authors

Settembre, C., and Ballabio, A. (2014). Cell metabolism: autophagy transcribed. Nature 516, 40–41.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bandfield, J. L., Glotch, T. D., and Christensen, P. R. (2003). Spectroscopic identification of carbonate minerals in the martian dust. Science 301, 1084–1087.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Bulmer, J. S., Martens, J., Kurzepa, L., Gizewski, T., Egilmez, M., Blamire, M. G., et al. (2014). Microwave conductivity of sorted CNT assemblies. Sci. Rep. 4, 3762.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Plumb, J. A., and Hanson, L. A. (2010). Health Maintenance and Principal Microbial Diseases of Cultured Fishes. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Wee Sit, E. ed. (2015). Sensors and Instrumentation, Volume 5: Proceedings of the 33rd IMAC, A Conference and Exposition on Structural Dynamics, 2015. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Geldenhuys, J., and Hansen, H. (2006). “Larger Automata and Less Work for LTL Model Checking,” in Model Checking Software: 13th International SPIN Workshop, Vienna, Austria, March 30 - April 1, 2006. Proceedings, ed. A. Valmari (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 53–70.

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 Neuroscience.

Blog post

Hamilton, K. (2017). Immunotherapy: Training The Body To Fight Cancer. 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 (2005). Federal Family Education Loan Program: More Oversight Is Needed for Schools That Are Lenders. 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

Davis, M. (2015). Opprobrious Identities: The Enslaving Effect of Black Respectability on Queer Black Men. Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois 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

Saslow, L. (2007). Suffolk Schools to Say Goodbye to DARE. New York Times, 14LI2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Turner, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Settembre and Ballabio, 2014; Turner, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Settembre and Ballabio, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Bulmer et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience
Abbreviation	Front. Mol. Neurosci.
ISSN (online)	1662-5099
Scope	Molecular Biology Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience