How to format your references using the Frontiers in Earth Science citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Frontiers in Earth Science. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Larson, H. (2015). The world must accept that the HPV vaccine is safe. Nature 528, 9.

A journal article with 2 authors

Wilberg, M. J., and Miller, T. J. (2007). Comment on “Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services.” Science 316, 1285; author reply 1285.

A journal article with 3 authors

Yu, X., Jin, L., and Zhou, Z. H. (2008). 3.88 A structure of cytoplasmic polyhedrosis virus by cryo-electron microscopy. Nature 453, 415–419.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Crittenden, S. L., Bernstein, D. S., Bachorik, J. L., Thompson, B. E., Gallegos, M., Petcherski, A. G., et al. (2002). A conserved RNA-binding protein controls germline stem cells in Caenorhabditis elegans. Nature 417, 660–663.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Nahar, L., and Sarker, S. D. (2012). Steroid Dimers. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Bull, L., and Kovacs, T. eds. (2005). Foundations of Learning Classifier Systems. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Osakada, F., and Takahashi, M. (2016). “Stem Cells in the Developing and Adult Nervous System,” in Regenerative Medicine - from Protocol to Patient: 1. Biology of Tissue Regeneration, ed. G. Steinhoff (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 123–149.

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 Earth Science.

Blog post

Luntz, S. (2015). Stunning Fossils Rewrite Evolutionary History of Life on Earth. 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 (1990). Aviation: FAA’s Use and Management of Communications Resources. 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

Pan, C.-M. (2012). Synthesis and Evaluation of Macrocycles as Potential Antitumor Agents. 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

Herrman, J. (2017). What if Platforms Like Facebook Are Too Big to Regulate? New York Times, MM14.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Larson, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Wilberg and Miller, 2007; Larson, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Wilberg and Miller, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Crittenden et al., 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Earth Science
Abbreviation	Front. Earth Sci.
ISSN (online)	2296-6463
Scope