How to format your references using the Frontiers in Plant Biophysics and Modeling citation style

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

Forró, L. (2000). NANOTECHNOLOGY: Beyond Gedanken Experiments. Science 289, 560–561.

A journal article with 2 authors

Körner, C., and Basler, D. (2010). Plant science. Phenology under global warming. Science 327, 1461–1462.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kennedy, S., Wang, D., and Ruvkun, G. (2004). A conserved siRNA-degrading RNase negatively regulates RNA interference in C. elegans. Nature 427, 645–649.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Drake, J. F., Swisdak, M., Cattell, C., Shay, M. A., Rogers, B. N., and Zeiler, A. (2003). Formation of electron holes and particle energization during magnetic reconnection. Science 299, 873–877.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Graham, C. (2014). Markov Chains: Analytic and Monte Carlo Computations. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Cazenave, T., Winands, M. H. M., and Iida, H. eds. (2014). Computer Games: Workshop on Computer Games, CGW 2013, Held in Conjunction with the 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2013, Beijing, China, August 3, 2013, Revised Selected Papers. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

D. Rosengarten, R., Santhanam, B., and Katoh-Kurasawa, M. (2013). “Transcriptional Regulators: Dynamic Drivers of Multicellular Formation, Cell Differentiation and Development,” in Dictyostelids: Evolution, Genomics and Cell Biology, eds. M. Romeralo, S. Baldauf, and R. Escalante (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 89–108.

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 Plant Biophysics and Modeling.

Blog post

Davis, J. (2016). Squirrel Leprosy Experiment To Take Place In Southern England. 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 (1990). International Broadcasting: Construction of U.S. Radio Relay Station in Israel. 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

Konzem, S. R. (2017). Tenability and Computability of Generalized Pólya Urns.

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

Burton, S. (2016). Woman Vs. Machine. New York Times, MM32.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Forró, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Forró, 2000; Körner and Basler, 2010).

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

Two authors: (Körner and Basler, 2010)
Three or more authors: (Drake et al., 2003)

About the journal

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

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