How to format your references using the Frontiers in Functional Plant Ecology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Frontiers in Functional Plant Ecology. 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 references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles 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

Reichhardt, T. (2001). Airborne telescope delayed as plane is made ready. Nature 411, 729.

A journal article with 2 authors

Feany, M. B., and Bender, W. W. (2000). A Drosophila model of Parkinson’s disease. Nature 404, 394–398.

A journal article with 3 authors

Morris, R. J., Lewis, O. T., and Godfray, H. C. J. (2004). Experimental evidence for apparent competition in a tropical forest food web. Nature 428, 310–313.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Prudhomme, M., Attaiech, L., Sanchez, G., Martin, B., and Claverys, J.-P. (2006). Antibiotic stress induces genetic transformability in the human pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae. Science 313, 89–92.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ratliff, T. A. (2005). The Laboratory Quality Assurance System. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Pluvinage, G., and Elwany, M. H. eds. (2008). Safety, Reliability and Risks Associated with Water, Oil and Gas Pipelines. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Yuan, Z., and Jiang, H. (2013). “Diffuse Optical Tomography for Brain Imaging: Theory,” in Optical Methods and Instrumentation in Brain Imaging and Therapy, ed. S. J. Madsen (New York, NY: Springer), 87–115.

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 Functional Plant Ecology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). Watch Bill Gates Drink Water That Was Sewage 5 Minutes Before. 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 (2017). School Bus Safety: Crash Data Trends and Federal and State Requirements. 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

Chan, A. B. (2008). Beyond dynamic textures: A family of stochastic dynamical models for video with applications to computer vision. 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

Crow, K. (2003). Buses Parked at Ground Zero: Sensible or Sacrilege? New York Times, 147.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Reichhardt, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Feany and Bender, 2000; Reichhardt, 2001).

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

Two authors: (Feany and Bender, 2000)
Three or more authors: (Prudhomme et al., 2006)

About the journal

Full journal title	Frontiers in Functional Plant Ecology
Abbreviation	Front. Plant Sci.
ISSN (online)	1664-462X
Scope	Plant Science