How to format your references using the Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience citation style

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

Kleiner, K. (2006). Assault on batteries. Nature 441, 1046–1047.

A journal article with 2 authors

Pörtner, H. O., and Knust, R. (2007). Climate change affects marine fishes through the oxygen limitation of thermal tolerance. Science 315, 95–97.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kohguchi, H., Suzuki, T., and Alexander, M. H. (2001). Fully state-resolved differential cross sections for the inelastic scattering of the open-shell NO molecule by Ar. Science 294, 832–834.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Rowland, H. D., King, W. P., Pethica, J. B., and Cross, G. L. W. (2008). Molecular confinement accelerates deformation of entangled polymers during squeeze flow. Science 322, 720–724.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Douglas, J., and Noy, E. A. (2010). Building Surveys and Reports. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Verbauwhede, I. M. R. ed. (2010). Secure Integrated Circuits and Systems. Boston, MA: Springer US.

A chapter in an edited book

Fernández-Ceniceros, J., Antoñanzas Torres, J., Urraca-Valle, R., Sodupe-Ortega, E., and Sanz-García, A. (2014). “Soft Computing Metamodels for the Failure Prediction of T-stub Bolted Connections,” in International Joint Conference SOCO’14-CISIS’14-ICEUTE’14: Bilbao, Spain, June 25th-27th, 2014, Proceedings, eds. J. G. de la Puerta, I. G. Ferreira, P. G. Bringas, F. Klett, A. Abraham, A. C. P. L. F. de Carvalho, et al. (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 41–51.

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 Systems Neuroscience.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2014). The Closest Hypervelocity Star Ever Seen. 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 (1996). School Lunch Program: Role and Impacts of Private Food Service Companies. 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

Sexton, S. M. (2017). Progress Toward Analytic Predictions of Supersonic Hydrocarbon-Air Combustion: Computation of Ignition Times and Supersonic Mixing Layers. La Jolla, CA: University of California San Diego.

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

Isbister, M. (2011). The Joy of Making Things. New York Times, BU10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kleiner, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Kleiner, 2006; Pörtner and Knust, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Pörtner and Knust, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Rowland et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
Abbreviation	Front. Syst. Neurosci.
ISSN (online)	1662-5137
Scope	Neuroscience (miscellaneous) Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience Cognitive Neuroscience Developmental Neuroscience