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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Brower, A. V. Z. (2004). Comment on “Molecular phylogenies link rates of evolution and speciation” (II). Science 303, 173; author reply 173.
A journal article with 2 authors
Krivtsov, A. V., and Armstrong, S. A. (2012). Cancer. Can one cell influence cancer heterogeneity? Science 338, 1035–1036.
A journal article with 3 authors
Asaadi, N., Ribe, N. M., and Sobouti, F. (2011). Inferring nonlinear mantle rheology from the shape of the Hawaiian swell. Nature 473, 501–504.
A journal article with 7 or more authors
Nestola, F., Korolev, N., Kopylova, M., Rotiroti, N., Pearson, D. G., Pamato, M. G., et al. (2018). CaSiO3 perovskite in diamond indicates the recycling of oceanic crust into the lower mantle. Nature 555, 237–241.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Hezaveh, A. (2007). SAS® 9 Study Guide. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Sanayei, A., Zelinka, I., and Rössler, O. E. eds. (2014). ISCS 2013: Interdisciplinary Symposium on Complex Systems. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Senkerik, R., Zelinka, I., Davendra, D., and Oplatkova, Z. (2010). “Evolutionary Design of Chaos Control in 1D,” in Evolutionary Algorithms and Chaotic Systems Studies in Computational Intelligence., eds. I. Zelinka, S. Celikovsky, H. Richter, and G. Chen (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 165–190.

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
Carpineti, A. (2017). Charon Helps Pluto Keep Its Atmosphere. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/charon-helps-pluto-keep-its-atmosphere/ [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 (2017). Maritime Environment: Federal and State Actions, Expenditures, and Challenges to Addressing Abandoned and Derelict Vessels. 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
De Felice, D. (2013). A Phenomenological Study of Teaching Endangered Languages Online: Perspectives from Nahua and Mayan Educators.

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
Kelly, C. (2016). Scent Notes: The Citrus Aroma of the Season. New York Times, ST3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Brower, 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Brower, 2004; Krivtsov and Armstrong, 2012).

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

  • Two authors: (Krivtsov and Armstrong, 2012)
  • Three or more authors: (Nestola et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal titleFrontiers in Spinal Cord Medicine
AbbreviationFront. Neurol.
ISSN (online)1664-2295
ScopeClinical Neurology
Neurology

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