How to format your references using the Frontiers in Robotics and AI citation style

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

Collins, J. (2012). Synthetic Biology: Bits and pieces come to life. Nature 483, S8-10.

A journal article with 2 authors

Grabbe, C., and Dikic, I. (2008). Cell biology. Going global on ubiquitin. Science 322, 872–873.

A journal article with 3 authors

Scarf, D., Hayne, H., and Colombo, M. (2011). Pigeons on par with primates in numerical competence. Science 334, 1664.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Föhlisch, A., Feulner, P., Hennies, F., Fink, A., Menzel, D., Sanchez-Portal, D., et al. (2005). Direct observation of electron dynamics in the attosecond domain. Nature 436, 373–376.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Cantrell, R. S., and Cosner, C. (2004). Spatial Ecology via Reaction-Diffusion Equations. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Camurri, A., and Costa, C. eds. (2012). Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment: 4th International ICST Conference, INTETAIN 2011, Genova, Italy, May 25-27, 2011, Revised Selected Papers. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Datta-Gupta, A., Devegowda, D., Oyerinde, D., and Cheng, H. (2008). “The Role of Streamline Models for Dynamic Data Assimilation in Petroleum Engineering and Hydrogeology,” in Quantitative Information Fusion for Hydrological Sciences, eds. X. Cai and T.-C. J. Yeh (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 105–136.

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 Robotics and AI.

Blog post

Andrews, R. (2016). This Incredible 50-Million-Year-Old Amber Shows The Moment An Insect Literally Jumped Out Of Its Skin. 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 (1992). The Job Training Partnership Act: Abuse of On-The-Job Training and Other Contracting Is an Ongoing Problem. 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

Nersessian, N. (2012). Modified gravity with scale invariance and implications. 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

Pilon, M. (2013). Sprinter in 1988 Olympic Scandal Denounces Doping. New York Times, B18.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Collins, 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Grabbe and Dikic, 2008; Collins, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Grabbe and Dikic, 2008)
Three or more authors: (Föhlisch et al., 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Abbreviation	Front. Robot. AI
ISSN (online)	2296-9144
Scope