How to format your references using the Frontiers in Virology citation style

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

Bruins, H. J. (2010). Anthropology. Dating Pharaonic Egypt. Science 328, 1489–1490.

A journal article with 2 authors

Christensen, S. T., and Ott, C. M. (2007). Cell signaling. A ciliary signaling switch. Science 317, 330–331.

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

Louzada, V. H. P., Araújo, N. A. M., Andrade, J. S., Jr, and Herrmann, H. J. (2013). Breathing synchronization in interconnected networks. Sci. Rep. 3, 3289.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Saunders, A., and Allen, L. (2010). Credit Risk Management in and Out of the Financial Crisis. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Shackelford, T. K., and Hansen, R. D. eds. (2015). The Evolution of Sexuality. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Ghosh, P., Bhattacharjee, D., and Nasipuri, M. (2015). “An Automatic Non-invasive System for Diagnosis of Tuberculosis,” in Applied Computation and Security Systems: Volume One, eds. R. Chaki, K. Saeed, S. Choudhury, and N. Chaki (New Delhi: Springer India), 59–70.

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 Virology.

Blog post

Hale, T. (2016). Thousands Of Dead Lobsters Are Washing Up On Beaches In California. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/thousands-small-lobsters-are-taking-over-beaches-california/ (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 (2014). Information Technology: SSA Needs to Address Limitations in Management Controls and Human Capital Planning to Support Modernization Efforts. 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

Bhavsar, K. S. (2017). Application of wavelet on quasi-periodic physiologic signals. Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach.

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

Billard, M. (2010). Silver Jubilee. New York Times, E6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Bruins, 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Christensen and Ott, 2007; Bruins, 2010).

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

Two authors: (Christensen and Ott, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Louzada et al., 2013)

About the journal

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