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

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

Fisk, L. A. (2005). Journey into the unknown beyond. Science 309, 2016–2017.

A journal article with 2 authors

Zhou, Q., and Bachtrog, D. (2012). Sex-specific adaptation drives early sex chromosome evolution in Drosophila. Science 337, 341–345.

A journal article with 3 authors

Babaev, E., Sudbø, A., and Ashcroft, N. W. (2004). A superconductor to superfluid phase transition in liquid metallic hydrogen. Nature 431, 666–668.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Nimura, K., Ura, K., Shiratori, H., Ikawa, M., Okabe, M., Schwartz, R. J., et al. (2009). A histone H3 lysine 36 trimethyltransferase links Nkx2-5 to Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. Nature 460, 287–291.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hooper, J., Zalewski, A., and Watanabe, E. (2013). Advanced Charting Techniques for High Probability Trading. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Henein, M. Y. ed. (2012). Clinical Echocardiography., 2nd ed. 2012. London: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Geist, A. (2008). “MPI Must Evolve or Die,” in Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface: 15th European PVM/MPI Users’ Group Meeting, Dublin, Ireland, September 7-10, 2008. Proceedings, eds. A. Lastovetsky, T. Kechadi, and J. Dongarra (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 5–5.

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 Cell Biology.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2015). Air Pollution Kills More Than Three Million People A Year. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/environment/air-pollution-kills-more-three-million-people-year/ (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 (1976). Problems Associated With D.C. Public Schools Payroll Reporting System. 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

Parsons, J. R. (2010). Throwing a wrench in the translational machinery: Discovery of RNA ligands by fluorescence techniques. 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

Vecsey, G. (2010). A Script, or Woods’s Road to Recovery? New York Times, B18.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Fisk, 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Fisk, 2005; Zhou and Bachtrog, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Zhou and Bachtrog, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Nimura et al., 2009)

About the journal

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