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

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

Hoag, H. (2003). Tougher rules aim to prevent gene flow into crops. Nature 422, 103.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kazmierczak, J., and Altermann, W. (2002). Neoarchean biomineralization by benthic cyanobacteria. Science 298, 2351.

A journal article with 3 authors

Fonseca, P. J., Münch, D., and Hennig, R. M. (2000). How cicadas interpret acoustic signals. Nature 405, 297–298.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Zhang, F.-L., Chen, J.-L., Kwek, L. C., and Vedral, V. (2013). Requirement of dissonance in assisted optimal state discrimination. Sci. Rep. 3, 2134.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Harrison, A. (2016). The Life of D. H. Lawrence. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Fairclough, S. H., and Gilleade, K. eds. (2014). Advances in Physiological Computing. London: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Cobb, B. R., Rumí, R., and Salmerón, A. (2005). “Modeling Conditional Distributions of Continuous Variables in Bayesian Networks,” in Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis VI: 6th International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis, IDA 2005, Madrid, Spain, September 8-10, 2005. Proceedings, eds. A. F. Famili, J. N. Kok, J. M. Peña, A. Siebes, and A. Feelders (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 36–45.

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 Neuroscience.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2016). Would We Want To Regenerate Brains Of Patients Who Are Clinically Dead? 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 (1975). Federal Funding Provided to 10 Police Departments for Intelligence Activities. 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

Bryant, D. (2012). A good story changes everything. 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

Corkery, M., and Walsh, M. W. (2015). Island Trips for Treasury. New York Times, B1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Hoag, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Kazmierczak and Altermann, 2002; Hoag, 2003).

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

Two authors: (Kazmierczak and Altermann, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Zhang et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Neuroscience
Abbreviation	Front. Neurosci.
ISSN (online)	1662-453X
Scope	General Neuroscience