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

Batey, R. T. (2014). Structural biology: Lariat lessons. Nature 514, 173–174.

A journal article with 2 authors

Rauch, W., and Kleidorfer, M. (2014). Water treatment. Replace contamination, not the pipes. Science 345, 734–735.

A journal article with 3 authors

Gómez-Llobregat, J., Buceta, J., and Reigada, R. (2013). Interplay of cytoskeletal activity and lipid phase stability in dynamic protein recruitment and clustering. Sci. Rep. 3, 2608.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Wiwatpanit, T., Lorenzen, S. M., Cantú, J. A., Foo, C. Z., Hogan, A. K., Márquez, F., et al. (2018). Trans-differentiation of outer hair cells into inner hair cells in the absence of INSM1. Nature.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hopkins, B. R. (2009). Starting and Managing a Nonprofit Organization. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Bengtsson, T. ed. (2010). Population Ageing - A Threat to the Welfare State?: The Case of Sweden. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Bavry, A. A., and Kumbhani, D. J. (2012). “Peripheral interventions,” in Indications and techniques of percutaneous procedures: Coronary, peripheral, and structural heart disease, ed. D. J. Kumbhani (Tarporley: Springer Healthcare Ltd.), 29–60.

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). East Asian Maths Teaching Method Boosts English Children’s Progress By A Month. 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 (1983). Query Regarding Department of Education Regulations. 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

Roberts, J. E. (2010). Process evaluation of the Instant Word Notebook. St. Charles, MO: Lindenwood University.

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

Kovaleski, S. F., Alter, A., and Howard, J. C. (2015). Friends, Fans and Now Alabama Debate the State of Harper Lee. New York Times, A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Batey, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Batey, 2014; Rauch and Kleidorfer, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Rauch and Kleidorfer, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Wiwatpanit et al., 2018)

About the journal

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