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

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

Redfield, R. J. (2011). Comment on “A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus.” Science 332, 1149; author reply 1149.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kalnay, E., and Cai, M. (2003). Impact of urbanization and land-use change on climate. Nature 423, 528–531.

A journal article with 3 authors

Russell, D. G., Barry, C. E., 3rd, and Flynn, J. L. (2010). Tuberculosis: what we don’t know can, and does, hurt us. Science 328, 852–856.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Courbet, S., Gay, S., Arnoult, N., Wronka, G., Anglana, M., Brison, O., et al. (2008). Replication fork movement sets chromatin loop size and origin choice in mammalian cells. Nature 455, 557–560.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bai, Y. (2012). Practical Database Programming with Visual Basic.NET. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Bonivento, C., Marconi, L., Rossi, C., and Isidori, A. eds. (2007). Advances in Control Theory and Applications. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Gentile, N. A. (2008). “Implicit Monte Carlo Radiation Transport Simulations of Four Test Problems,” in Computational Methods in Transport: Verification and Validation, ed. F. Graziani (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 135–150.

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 Science.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). Testing Ancient Human Hearing Via Fossilized Ear Bones. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/testing-ancient-human-hearing-fossilized-ear-bones/ (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). Airline Competition: Strategies for Addressing Financial and Competitive Problems in the Airline Industry. 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

Schick, V. R. (2010). Examining the vulva: The relationship between female genital aesthetic perceptions and gynecological care. Washington, DC: George Washington 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

Urbina, I. (2016). A Model for ‘Clean Coal’ Goes Awry. 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 (Redfield, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Kalnay and Cai, 2003; Redfield, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Kalnay and Cai, 2003)
Three or more authors: (Courbet et al., 2008)

About the journal

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