How to format your references using the Frontiers in Plant Metabolism and Chemodiversity citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Frontiers in Plant Metabolism and Chemodiversity. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Dunn, B. (2012). Cancer: Solving an age-old problem. Nature 483, S2-6.
A journal article with 2 authors
Zhang, Y., and Kalderon, D. (2001). Hedgehog acts as a somatic stem cell factor in the Drosophila ovary. Nature 410, 599–604.
A journal article with 3 authors
Pergams, O. R. W., Barnes, W. M., and Nyberg, D. (2003). Mammalian microevolution: Rapid change in mouse mitochondrial DNA. Nature 423, 397.
A journal article with 7 or more authors
Zhu, Y., Zhu, L.-N., Guo, R., Cui, H.-J., Ye, S., and Fang, Q. (2014). Nanoliter-scale protein crystallization and screening with a microfluidic droplet robot. Sci. Rep. 4, 5046.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
McGrath, A. E. (2011). Darwinism and the Divine. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
An edited book
Blakeley, S. ed. (2008). Renal Failure and Replacement Therapies. London: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Jarrick, A. (2013). “The Scientific Mission and the Freedom of Research,” in Transformations in Research, Higher Education and the Academic Market: The Breakdown of Scientific Thought, eds. S. Rider, Y. Hasselberg, and A. Waluszewski (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands), 53–67.

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 Metabolism and Chemodiversity.

Blog post
Hamilton, K. (2015). NASA Satellite Provides Global Precipitation Map And 3D Video Of Winter Storm. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/environment/nasa-satellite-provides-global-precipitation-map-and-3d-video-snowstorm/ (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 (2001). Early Childhood Programs: The Use of Impact Evaluations to Assess Program Effects. 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
Davidson, A. O. (2009). Observing action research processes in practice. 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
Kenigsberg, B. (2017). This Time Tomorrow. New York Times, C9.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Dunn, 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Zhang and Kalderon, 2001; Dunn, 2012).

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

  • Two authors: (Zhang and Kalderon, 2001)
  • Three or more authors: (Zhu et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleFrontiers in Plant Metabolism and Chemodiversity
AbbreviationFront. Plant Sci.
ISSN (online)1664-462X
ScopePlant Science

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