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

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

Hipps, K. W. (2001). Molecular electronics. It’s all about contacts. Science 294, 536–537.

A journal article with 2 authors

Morris, T., and Podsiadlowski, P. (2007). The triple-ring nebula around SN 1987A: fingerprint of a binary merger. Science 315, 1103–1106.

A journal article with 3 authors

Richardson, C. E., Kooistra, T., and Kim, D. H. (2010). An essential role for XBP-1 in host protection against immune activation in C. elegans. Nature 463, 1092–1095.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Linn, M. C., Lee, H.-S., Tinker, R., Husic, F., and Chiu, J. L. (2006). Inquiry learning. Teaching and assessing knowledge integration in science. Science 313, 1049–1050.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Das, J. C. (2017). Understanding Symmetrical Components for Power System Modeling. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Blockeel, H., Kersting, K., Nijssen, S., and Železný, F. eds. (2013). Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: European Conference, ECML PKDD 2013, Prague, Czech Republic, September 23-27, 2013, Proceedings, Part III. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Harper, R. H. R. (2014). “The Metaphysics of Communications Overload,” in Mobile Social Signal Processing: First International Workshop, MSSP 2010, Lisbon, Portugal, September 7, 2010, Invited Papers Lecture Notes in Computer Science., ed. R. Murray-Smith (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 42–50.

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 Physiology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). New Single-Dose Malaria Treatment Could Eventually Help Millions. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/new-single-dose-malaria-treatment-could-eventually-help-millions/ [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 (1993). TQM Implementation at NASA. 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

Young, W. B. (2017). First-Generation Undergraduate Researchers: Engaging and Validating Cultural Wealth-Based Self-Authors.

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

Paulson, M. (2017). Soho Rep to Return. New York Times, C3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Hipps, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Hipps, 2001; Morris and Podsiadlowski, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Morris and Podsiadlowski, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Linn et al., 2006)

About the journal

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