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

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

Aldhous, P. (2000). Protests force primate farm to close. Nature 404, 215.

A journal article with 2 authors

Hughes, K. J., and Kennedy, B. K. (2012). Cell biology. Rapamycin paradox resolved. Science 335, 1578–1579.

A journal article with 3 authors

Hayden, B. Y., Pearson, J. M., and Platt, M. L. (2009). Fictive reward signals in the anterior cingulate cortex. Science 324, 948–950.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Martins, F., Faniel, S., Rosenow, B., Sellier, H., Huant, S., Pala, M. G., et al. (2013). Coherent tunnelling across a quantum point contact in the quantum Hall regime. Sci. Rep. 3, 1416.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Iacus, S. M. (2011). Option Pricing and Estimation of Financial Models with R. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Golden, C. J. (2016). The Intercorrelation of Traumatic Brain Injury and PTSD in Neuropsychological Evaluations., eds. L. D. Driskell and L. K. Lashley. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Machado, F., Santos, M., Almeida, V., and Guedes, D. (2010). “Characterizing Mobility and Contact Networks in Virtual Worlds,” in Facets of Virtual Environments: First International Conference, FaVE 2009, Berlin, Germany, July 27-29, 2009, Revised Selected Papers, eds. F. Lehmann-Grube and J. Sablatnig (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 44–59.

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 Systems Biology.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2015). Rats Aren’t to Blame for the Plague in Europe: It Was Gerbils. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/rats-arent-blame-plague-europe-it-was-gerbils/ (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 (2009). Global Positioning System: Significant Challenges in Sustaining and Upgrading Widely Used Capabilities. 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

Desai, S. S. (2013). CFD simuation of flow past a rotating circular cylinder with an end plate. Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach.

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

Kelly, C. (2009). Physical Therapy and the Camaraderie of Healing. New York Times, D5.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Aldhous, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Aldhous, 2000; Hughes and Kennedy, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Hughes and Kennedy, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Martins et al., 2013)

About the journal

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