How to format your references using the Frontiers in Neural Circuits citation style

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

Telford, M. J. (2013). Evolution. The animal tree of life. Science 339, 764–766.

A journal article with 2 authors

Müller, U. K., and Lentink, D. (2004). Physiology. Turning on a dime. Science 306, 1899–1900.

A journal article with 3 authors

Agrawal, T., Schu, P., and Medigeshi, G. R. (2013). Adaptor protein complexes-1 and 3 are involved at distinct stages of flavivirus life-cycle. Sci. Rep. 3, 1813.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Mendez, R., Hake, L. E., Andresson, T., Littlepage, L. E., Ruderman, J. V., and Richter, J. D. (2000). Phosphorylation of CPE binding factor by Eg2 regulates translation of c-mos mRNA. Nature 404, 302–307.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Dubil, R. (2011). Financial Engineering and Arbitrage in the Financial Markets. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Kerschen, G. ed. (2016). Nonlinear Dynamics, Volume 1: Proceedings of the 34th IMAC, A Conference and Exposition on Structural Dynamics 2016. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Richardson, H. W., Pan, Q., Gordon, P., Park, J., and Moore, J. E. (2015). “A Radiological Bomb Attack on the Downtown Los Angeles Financial District,” in Regional Economic Impacts of Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters and Metropolitan Policies, eds. H. W. Richardson, Q. Pan, J. Park, and J. E. Moore II (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 65–85.

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 Neural Circuits.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). Vultures In Crisis: Poachers And Poison Threaten Nature’s Garbage Disposers. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/vultures-crisis-poachers-and-poison-threaten-nature-s-garbage-disposers/ (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 (1989). FAA Research, Engineering and Development Issues. 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

Ready, C. (2014). Preventing childhood obesity in foster children: A grant proposal. 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

Saslow, L. (2006). Route 110 Plan Worries Some Merchants. New York Times, LI2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Telford, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Müller and Lentink, 2004; Telford, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Müller and Lentink, 2004)
Three or more authors: (Mendez et al., 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Neural Circuits
Abbreviation	Front. Neural Circuits
ISSN (online)	1662-5110
Scope	Neuroscience (miscellaneous) Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience Cognitive Neuroscience Sensory Systems