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

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

Norrby, S. R. (2004). Alert to a European epidemic. Nature 431, 507–508.

A journal article with 2 authors

Todd, J. J., and Marois, R. (2004). Capacity limit of visual short-term memory in human posterior parietal cortex. Nature 428, 751–754.

A journal article with 3 authors

Cheng, Y.-N., Wu, X.-C., and Ji, Q. (2004). Triassic marine reptiles gave birth to live young. Nature 432, 383–386.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Mazurek, M. D., Schreiter, K. M., Prevedel, R., Kaltenbaek, R., and Resch, K. J. (2013). Dispersion-cancelled biological imaging with quantum-inspired interferometry. Sci. Rep. 3, 1582.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Morgan, A. (2009). Eating the Big Fish. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Pechan, P. (2011). Safe or Not Safe: Deciding What Risks to Accept in Our Environment and Food., eds. O. Renn, A. Watt, and I. Pongratz. New York, NY: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Ashar, N. G., and Golwalkar, K. R. (2013). “Sulfonating Agents and Derivatives Based on Sulfuric Acid,” in A Practical Guide to the Manufacture of Sulfuric Acid, Oleums, and Sulfonating Agents, ed. K. R. Golwalkar (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 35–52.

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 Environmental Science.

Blog post

Luntz, S. (2014). Ancient Americans Hunted Bizarre Elephant Relative. 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 (1978). Federal Direction Needed for Educating Handicapped Children in State Schools. 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

Shina, Y. E. (2013). Youth under the care of the child welfare and juvenile justice systems: A grant proposal for crossover youth. 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

Marx, L. (2017). Two Different Cultures, One Modern Marriage. New York Times, ST10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Norrby, 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Norrby, 2004; Todd and Marois, 2004).

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

Two authors: (Todd and Marois, 2004)
Three or more authors: (Mazurek et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Environmental Science
Abbreviation	Front. Environ. Sci.
ISSN (online)	2296-665X
Scope