How to format your references using the Frontiers in Spinal Cord Medicine citation style

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

Kaiser, J. (2000). TOXICOLOGY: Just How Bad Is Dioxin? Science 288, 1941b–4b.

A journal article with 2 authors

Rowley, J. J. L., and Alford, R. A. (2013). Hot bodies protect amphibians against chytrid infection in nature. Sci. Rep. 3, 1515.

A journal article with 3 authors

Sta Ana, J. L., Frankel, M. S., and Berger, K. M. (2009). Biosecurity. Educating scientists about dual use. Science 326, 1193.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Root, T. L., Price, J. T., Hall, K. R., Schneider, S. H., Rosenzweig, C., and Pounds, J. A. (2003). Fingerprints of global warming on wild animals and plants. Nature 421, 57–60.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Michaelian, K. H. (2005). Photoacoustic Infrared Spectroscopy. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Bock, W. J., Gannot, I., and Tanev, S. eds. (2008). Optical Waveguide Sensing and Imaging. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Tiliouine, H., and Estes, R. J. (2016). “Social Development in North African Countries: Achievements and Current Challenges,” in The State of Social Progress of Islamic Societies: Social, Economic, Political, and Ideological Challenges, eds. H. Tiliouine and R. J. Estes (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 109–136.

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 Spinal Cord Medicine.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). Experimental Greenhouses Grow Strawberries Underwater. 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 (1989). ADP Systems: SSA Efforts in Implementing Its Field Office Modernization. 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

Wiggins, B. B. (2017). Using Induced Signals to Develop a Position-Sensitive Microchannel Plate Detector. Bloomington, IN: Indiana 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

Sisario, B. (2016). Metallica’s ‘Hardwired’ Hits No. 1 on Chart. New York Times, C4.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kaiser, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Kaiser, 2000; Rowley and Alford, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Rowley and Alford, 2013)
Three or more authors: (Root et al., 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Spinal Cord Medicine
Abbreviation	Front. Neurol.
ISSN (online)	1664-2295
Scope	Clinical Neurology Neurology