How to format your references using the Frontiers in Microbiological Chemistry citation style

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

Glass, L. (2003). Obituary: Arthur T. Winfree (1942-2002). Nature 421, 34.

A journal article with 2 authors

Baldwin, M. P., and Dunkerton, T. J. (2001). Stratospheric harbingers of anomalous weather regimes. Science 294, 581–584.

A journal article with 3 authors

Lindström, N. O., Hohenstein, P., and Davies, J. A. (2013). Nephrons require Rho-kinase for proximal-distal polarity development. Sci. Rep. 3, 2692.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Uchida, L., Espada-Murao, L. A., Takamatsu, Y., Okamoto, K., Hayasaka, D., Yu, F., et al. (2014). The dengue virus conceals double-stranded RNA in the intracellular membrane to escape from an interferon response. Sci. Rep. 4, 7395.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Lee, J. C., and McCormick, N. J. (2011). Risk and Safety Analysis of Nuclear Systems. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Wallace, T. C. (2013). Dietary Supplement Regulation in the United States., eds. D. MacKay, R. Al-Mondhiry, H. Nguyen, and J. C. Griffiths. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Xie, J. (2012). “Research on Complex Networks Evolution Model,” in Advances in Computer Science and Information Engineering: Volume 1, eds. D. Jin and S. Lin (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 29–33.

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 Microbiological Chemistry.

Blog post

Hamilton, K. (2016). Genes Can Have Up To 80% Influence On Students’ Academic Performance. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/genes-can-have-up-to-80percent-influence-on-students-academic-performance/ (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 (2016). Advanced Technologies: Strengthened Federal Approach Needed to Help Identify and Mitigate Supply Risks for Critical Raw Materials. 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

Armstrong, A. (2008). Tactic-Based Learning for collective learning systems. Washington, DC: George Washington 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

Cooper, M. (2017). Dudamel Condemns Venezuelan Politics. New York Times, C2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Glass, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Baldwin and Dunkerton, 2001; Glass, 2003).

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

Two authors: (Baldwin and Dunkerton, 2001)
Three or more authors: (Uchida et al., 2014)

About the journal

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