How to format your references using the Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences citation style

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

Mindell, J. A. (2010). Structural biology. The Tao of chloride transporter structure. Science 330, 601–602.

A journal article with 2 authors

Famiglietti, J. S., and Rodell, M. (2013). Environmental science. Water in the balance. Science 340, 1300–1301.

A journal article with 3 authors

Wu, B., Chen, J., and Singer, R. H. (2014). Background free imaging of single mRNAs in live cells using split fluorescent proteins. Sci. Rep. 4, 3615.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Lewis, F. D., Liu, X., Liu, J., Miller, S. E., Hayes, R. T., and Wasielewski, M. R. (2000). Direct measurement of hole transport dynamics in DNA. Nature 406, 51–53.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Petrozzi, S. (2012). Practical Instrumental Analysis. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

Gabbay, D. M. (2011). Conditionals and Modularity in General Logics., ed. K. Schlechta. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Karlsson, F., and Ågerfalk, P. J. (2008). “Method Configuration: The eXtreme Programming Case,” in Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming: 9th International Conference, XP 2008, Limerick, Ireland, June 10-14, 2008. Proceedings, eds. P. Abrahamsson, R. Baskerville, K. Conboy, B. Fitzgerald, L. Morgan, and X. Wang (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 32–41.

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 Molecular Biosciences.

Blog post

Luntz, S. (2014). Crows Understand Displacement Better Than Six Year Olds. 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 (2011). Transportation Worker Identification Credential: Internal Control Weaknesses Need to Be Corrected to Help Achieve Security Objectives. 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

Blazer, A. E. (2003). “I Am Otherwise”: The Romance Between Poetry and Theory After the Death of the Subject. Columbus, OH: Ohio State 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

Kelly, C. (2008). Finishing Tarrytown Hall, in Nick of Time. New York Times, WE2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Mindell, 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Mindell, 2010; Famiglietti and Rodell, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Famiglietti and Rodell, 2013)
Three or more authors: (Lewis et al., 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences
Abbreviation	Front. Mol. Biosci.
ISSN (online)	2296-889X
Scope