How to format your references using the Frontiers in Neuroscience citation style

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

Diallinas, G. (2008). Biochemistry. An almost-complete movie. Science 322, 1644–1645.

A journal article with 2 authors

Bucknall, D. G., and Anderson, H. L. (2003). Chemistry. Polymers get organized. Science 302, 1904–1905.

A journal article with 3 authors

Tanimoto, H., Heisenberg, M., and Gerber, B. (2004). Experimental psychology: event timing turns punishment to reward. Nature 430, 983.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Goslar, T., Arnold, M., Tisnerat-Laborde, N., Czernik, J., and Wieckowski, K. (2000). Variations of Younger Dryas atmospheric radiocarbon explicable without ocean circulation changes. Nature 403, 877–880.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Morrow, E., Boaz, A., Brearley, S., and Ross, F. (2011). Handbook of Service User Involvement in Nursing and Healthcare Research. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Kurbanoğlu, S., Špiranec, S., Grassian, E., Mizrachi, D., and Catts, R. eds. (2014). Information Literacy. Lifelong Learning and Digital Citizenship in the 21st Century: Second European Conference, ECIL 2014, Dubrovnik, Croatia, October 20-23, 2014. Proceedings. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Barnes, A. J. (2016). “Childhood Stress and Resilience,” in Health Promotion for Children and Adolescents, ed. M. R. Korin (Boston, MA: Springer US), 85–98.

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 Neuroscience.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014). India’s Space Agency Successfully Launches Its Heaviest Rocket. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/indias-space-agency-successfully-launches-its-heaviest-rocket/ (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 (2013). Education Research: Preliminary Observations on the Institute of Education Sciences’ Research and Evaluation Efforts. 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

Frieberg, A. (2008). The Project of Reconciliation: Journalists and religious activists in Polish -German relations, 1956–1972. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina.

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

Saslow, L. (2009). Citing Taxes, Some Seek Fire District’s Demise. New York Times, LI5.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Diallinas, 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Bucknall and Anderson, 2003; Diallinas, 2008).

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

Two authors: (Bucknall and Anderson, 2003)
Three or more authors: (Goslar et al., 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Neuroscience
Abbreviation	Front. Neurosci.
ISSN (online)	1662-453X
Scope	General Neuroscience