How to format your references using the Frontiers in Systems Biology citation style

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

Dagotto, E. (2001). Superconductivity. The race to beat the cuprates. Science 293, 2410–2411.

A journal article with 2 authors

Hyde, J. S., and Linn, M. C. (2006). Diversity. Gender similarities in mathematics and science. Science 314, 599–600.

A journal article with 3 authors

Hoskinson, E., Packard, R. E., and Haard, T. M. (2005). Oscillatory motion: quantum whistling in superfluid helium-4. Nature 433, 376.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Cissé, M., Halabisky, B., Harris, J., Devidze, N., Dubal, D. B., Sun, B., et al. (2011). Reversing EphB2 depletion rescues cognitive functions in Alzheimer model. Nature 469, 47–52.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Rhee, M. Y. (2013). Wireless Mobile Internet Security. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Ishikawa, Y., Li, J., Wang, W., Zhang, R., and Zhang, W. eds. (2013). Web Technologies and Applications: 15th Asia-Pacific Web Conference, APWeb 2013, Sydney, Australia, April 4-6, 2013. Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Dong, L., and Jiang, F. (2012). “A Novel Multi-Strategy Routing for UWB Ad Hoc Networks,” in Practical Applications of Intelligent Systems: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Knowledge Engineering, Shanghai, China, Dec 2011 (ISKE2011), eds. Y. Wang and T. Li (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 25–30.

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 Systems Biology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). How To Argue With Anti-Vaxxers, According To Science. 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 (2007). NASA Supplier Base: Challenges Exist in Transitioning from the Space Shuttle Program to the Next Generation of Human Space Flight Systems. 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

Maranhao, B. (2015). Efficient identification of disease causative mutations with next generation sequencing technologies. La Jolla, CA: University of California San Diego.

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). A Beloved Russian Baritone’s Surprise Return. New York Times, C4.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Dagotto, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Dagotto, 2001; Hyde and Linn, 2006).

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

Two authors: (Hyde and Linn, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Cissé et al., 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Systems Biology
Abbreviation	Front. Psychiatry
ISSN (online)	1664-0640
Scope	Psychiatry and Mental health