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

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

Heaven, M. C. (2013). Chemistry. Turn the molecule this way for a faster reaction. Science 342, 46–47.

A journal article with 2 authors

Knouse, K. A., and Amon, A. (2015). Cell biology: the micronucleus gets its big break. Nature 522, 162–163.

A journal article with 3 authors

Dloniak, S. M., French, J. A., and Holekamp, K. E. (2006). Rank-related maternal effects of androgens on behaviour in wild spotted hyaenas. Nature 440, 1190–1193.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Yao, J., Liu, Z., Liu, Y., Wang, Y., Sun, C., Bartal, G., et al. (2008). Optical negative refraction in bulk metamaterials of nanowires. Science 321, 930.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Curtis, P. M. (2011). Maintaining Mission Critical Systems in a 24/7 Environment. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Schoen, R. ed. (2016). Dynamic Demographic Analysis. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Cockburn, D., and Kobti, Z. (2009). “Agent Specialization in Complex Social Swarms,” in Innovations in Swarm Intelligence Studies in Computational Intelligence., eds. C. P. Lim, L. C. Jain, and S. Dehuri (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 77–89.

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 Nutrition.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). After Ten Years, Spacecraft Will End Life As Just Another Crater On Mercury’s Surface. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/after-ten-years-spacecraft-will-end-life-just-another-crater-mercury-s-surface/ [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 (1988). Comparison of Amtrak Employee Injury Settlement Costs Under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act and State Workers’ Compensation Programs. 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

Jurka, J. (2010). The importance of being a complement: CED effects revisited.

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

Blanchard, K. (2010). Let the Pill Go Free. New York Times, A27.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Heaven, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Heaven, 2013; Knouse and Amon, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Knouse and Amon, 2015)
Three or more authors: (Yao et al., 2008)

About the journal

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