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

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

Baker, M. (2011). Synthetic genomes: The next step for the synthetic genome. Nature 473, 403, 405–8.

A journal article with 2 authors

Pohrt, R., and Popov, V. L. (2013). Contact stiffness of randomly rough surfaces. Sci. Rep. 3, 3293.

A journal article with 3 authors

Fuda, N. J., Ardehali, M. B., and Lis, J. T. (2009). Defining mechanisms that regulate RNA polymerase II transcription in vivo. Nature 461, 186–192.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Übel, C., Graser, A., Koch, S., Rieker, R. J., Lehr, H. A., Müller, M., et al. (2014). Role of Tyk-2 in Th9 and Th17 cells in allergic asthma. Sci. Rep. 4, 5865.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hansen, K. L., and Zenobia, K. E. (2011). Civil Engineer’s Handbook of Professional Practice. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Kagen, L. J. ed. (2009). The Inflammatory Myopathies. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press.

A chapter in an edited book

Marquardt, W., Morbach, J., Wiesner, A., and Yang, A. (2010). “Meta Model,” in OntoCAPE: A Re-Usable Ontology for Chemical Process Engineering, eds. J. Morbach, A. Wiesner, and A. Yang (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 57–108.

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 Physiology.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J. (2017). Scientists Just Dealt A Major Blow To The Search For Life. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/scientists-just-dealt-a-major-blow-to-the-search-for-life/ (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 (2016). Smartphone Data: Information and Issues Regarding Surreptitious Tracking Apps That Can Facilitate Stalking. 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

Malkus, N. (2012). Beneath the district averages: Intradistrict differences in teacher compensation expenditures. College Park, MD: University of Maryland, College Park.

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

Hodara, S. (2016). While Others Sleep, They Make Art. New York Times, WE10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Baker, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Baker, 2011; Pohrt and Popov, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Pohrt and Popov, 2013)
Three or more authors: (Übel et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Physiology
Abbreviation	Front. Physiol.
ISSN (online)	1664-042X
Scope	Physiology Physiology (medical)