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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Frontiers in Life 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	Download the output style file
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

Norman MR. 2009. Physics. Chasing arcs in cuprate superconductors. Science. 325(5944):1080–1081.

A journal article with 2 authors

Turtle EP, Pierazzo E. 2001. Thickness of a Europan ice shell from impact crater simulations. Science. 294(5545):1326–1328.

A journal article with 3 authors

Weisbuch M, Pauker K, Ambady N. 2009. The subtle transmission of race bias via televised nonverbal behavior. Science. 326(5960):1711–1714.

A journal article with 12 or more authors

Gao C, Lin Q, Zhang S, He J, Lu X, Wang G. 2014. Historical trends of atmospheric black carbon on Sanjiang Plain as reconstructed from a 150-year peat record. Sci Rep. 4:5723.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

King M. 2011. Process Control. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Caires L, Italiano GF, Monteiro L, Palamidessi C, Yung M, editors. 2005. Automata, Languages and Programming: 32nd International Colloquium, ICALP 2005, Lisbon, Portugal, July 11-15, 2005. Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Bache R, Azzopardi L. 2010. Improving Access to Large Patent Corpora. In: Hameurlain A, Küng J, Wagner R, Bach Pedersen T, Tjoa AM, editors. Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems II. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; p. 103–121.

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 Life Science.

Blog post

Andrew D. 2015. Ice Melting From the Inside Out Creates Frozen Waterfall. IFLScience [Internet]. [accessed 2018 Oct 30]. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/ice-melting-inside-out-creates-frozen-waterfall/

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. 1977. The Impact Aid Program. 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

Farrell BM. 2010. Body composition changes and work-efficiency effects from diet modification and incorporation of an at-home exercise regimen [Doctoral dissertation]. Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati.

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

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Norman 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Turtle and Pierazzo 2001; Norman 2009).

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

Two authors: (Turtle and Pierazzo 2001)
Three or more authors: (Gao et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Life Science
Abbreviation	Front. Life Sci.
ISSN (print)	2155-3769
ISSN (online)	2155-3777
Scope	General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology General Neuroscience