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

Mervis, J. (2015). Behind the numbers. Salaries pump up biomedical inflation. Science 349, 225.

A journal article with 2 authors

Schmerr, N., and Garnero, E. J. (2007). Upper mantle discontinuity topography from thermal and chemical heterogeneity. Science 318, 623–626.

A journal article with 3 authors

Turalska, M., West, B. J., and Grigolini, P. (2013). Role of committed minorities in times of crisis. Sci. Rep. 3, 1371.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Liu, M., Wang, T., Ma, H., Fu, Y., Hu, K., and Guan, C. (2014). Assembly of luminescent ordered multilayer thin-films based on oppositely-charged MMT and magnetic NiFe-LDHs nanosheets with ultra-long lifetimes. Sci. Rep. 4, 7147.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bitton, G. (2014). Microbiology of Drinking Water. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Butz, A., Fisher, B., Krüger, A., Olivier, P., and Christie, M. eds. (2008). Smart Graphics: 9th International Symposium, SG 2008, Rennes, France, August 27-29, 2008. Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Carey, J. C. (2010). “The Importance of Case Reports in Advancing Scientific Knowledge of Rare Diseases,” in Rare Diseases Epidemiology Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology., eds. M. Posada de la Paz and S. C. Groft (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands), 77–86.

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

Hamilton, K. (2015). Man Sings ‘If Only I Had A Brain’ During MRI. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/technology/watch-man-sings-wizard-oz-song-during-super-fast-mri/ [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 (1986). Space Shuttle: NASA’s Procurement of Solid Rocket Booster Motors. 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

Shrank, S. M. (2017). ShareOne: An iOS resource application for caseworkers: A grant proposal.

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. (2012). Armstrong Finds a Mixed Reception in Triathlon. New York Times, B14.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Mervis, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Schmerr and Garnero, 2007; Mervis, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Schmerr and Garnero, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Liu et al., 2014)

About the journal

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