How to format your references using the Frontiers in Terrestrial Microbiology citation style

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

Pennisi, E. (2015). Beetle horns and book writing. Science 350, 1578.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gorin, D. J., and Toste, F. D. (2007). Relativistic effects in homogeneous gold catalysis. Nature 446, 395–403.

A journal article with 3 authors

Smith, M. H., Ploegh, H. L., and Weissman, J. S. (2011). Road to ruin: targeting proteins for degradation in the endoplasmic reticulum. Science 334, 1086–1090.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Wijnands, R., Van Der Klis, M., Homan, J., Chakrabarty, D., Markwardt, C. B., and Morgan, E. H. (2003). Quasi-periodic X-ray brightness fluctuations in an accreting millisecond pulsar. Nature 424, 44–47.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

bauforumstahl e.V. (2011). Beispiele zur Bemessung von Stahltragwerken nach DIN EN 1993 Eurocode 3. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

Almeida, P. R., Quintella, B. R., Costa, M. J., and Moore, A. eds. (2007). Developments in Fish Telemetry: Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Fish Telemetry held in Europe. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Mostafa, H., Kumar, A., and Lau, H. C. (2016). “Simultaneous Optimization and Sampling of Agent Trajectories over a Network,” in Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: AAMAS 2016 Workshops, Visionary Papers, Singapore, Singapore, May 9-10, 2016, Revised Selected Papers, eds. N. Osman and C. Sierra (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 50–66.

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 Terrestrial Microbiology.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J. (2016). NASA Is Sending A Rover Into A Water-Carved Gully On Mars For The First Time. 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). Job Training Partnership Act: Actions Needed to Improve Participant Support Services. 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

Bremond, D. S. (2017). When women win: Prominent leadership traits that contributed to the successful election of women in California. Malibu, CA: Pepperdine 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

LaFORGIA, M., and Eder, S. (2017). That Neighbor Who Grouses? Now President. New York Times, A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Pennisi, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Gorin and Toste, 2007; Pennisi, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Gorin and Toste, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Wijnands et al., 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Terrestrial Microbiology
Abbreviation	Front. Microbiol.
ISSN (online)	1664-302X
Scope	Microbiology Microbiology (medical)