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

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

Wiersma, D. (2000). The smallest random laser. Nature 406, 132–133.

A journal article with 2 authors

Makse, H. A., and Kurchan, J. (2002). Testing the thermodynamic approach to granular matter with a numerical model of a decisive experiment. Nature 415, 614–617.

A journal article with 3 authors

Hwang, J., Timusk, T., and Gu, G. D. (2004). High-transition-temperature superconductivity in the absence of the magnetic-resonance mode. Nature 427, 714–717.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Verlet, J. R. R., Bragg, A. E., Kammrath, A., Cheshnovsky, O., and Neumark, D. M. (2005). Comment on “Characterization of excess electrons in water-cluster anions by quantum simulations.” Science 310, 1769; author reply 1769.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Waxman, A. B. (2017). Rogues of Wall Street. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Salvetti, M. V., Geurts, B., Meyers, J., and Sagaut, P. eds. (2011). Quality and Reliability of Large-Eddy Simulations II. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Wrembel, R., and Bębel, B. (2007). “Metadata Management in a Multiversion Data Warehouse,” in Journal on Data Semantics VIII, eds. S. Spaccapietra, P. Atzeni, F. Fages, M.-S. Hacid, M. Kifer, J. Mylopoulos, et al. (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 118–157.

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 Psychology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2016). It’s The Year 2020…How’s Your Cybersecurity? IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/environment/it-s-year-2020-how-s-your-cybersecurity/ (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 (2010). Public Transportation: Use of Contractors is Generally Enhancing Transit Project Oversight, and FTA is Taking Actions to Address Some Stakeholder Concerns. 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

Moore, J. (2012). Recall after conscious sedation for gastrointestinal endoscopic procedures and its effect on patient satisfaction. 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

Crow, K. (2001). Preserving the Work of the Artful Tagger. New York Times, 143.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Wiersma, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Wiersma, 2000; Makse and Kurchan, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Makse and Kurchan, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Verlet et al., 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Psychology
Abbreviation	Front. Psychol.
ISSN (online)	1664-1078
Scope	General Psychology