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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Trends 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	Download the output style file
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

Parker, D.E. (2004) Climate: large-scale warming is not urban. Nature 432, 290

A journal article with 2 authors

O’Connell, L.A. and Hofmann, H.A. (2012) Evolution of a vertebrate social decision-making network. Science 336, 1154–1157

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang, L. et al. (2014) Atomistic simulation of tensile deformation behavior of ∑5 tilt grain boundaries in copper bicrystal. Sci. Rep. 4, 5919

A journal article with 3 or more authors

Min, S.K. et al. (2014) Mechanosensitive physiology of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii under direct membrane distortion. Sci. Rep. 4, 4675

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Jeong, H. (2014) Architectures for Computer Vision, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

An edited book

Novak, J.M. (2014) Leading For Educational Lives: Inviting and Sustaining Imaginative Acts of Hope in a Connected World, SensePublishers

A chapter in an edited book

McNeeley, M.F. et al. (2015) Diagnostic Fluoroscopy for Imaging Crohn’s Disease. In Crohn’s Disease: Basic Principles (Fichera, A. and Krane, M. K., eds), pp. 65–74, Springer International Publishing

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 Trends in Plant Science.

Blog post

Luntz, S. (2016) Mantis Shrimps Roll Their Eyes For Better Vision. IFLScience. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/mantis-shrimps-roll-their-eyes-for-better-vision/. [Accessed: 30-Oct-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 (2005) 21st Century Challenges: Reexamining the Base of the Federal Government, 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

Britigan, D.H. (2009) Health information sources and health literacy levels of Latinos in a midwestern tri -state area. Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati

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

Walsh, M.W. (2012) Untouchable Pensions May Be Tested in CaliforniaNew York Times, B1

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Trends in Plant Science
Abbreviation	Trends Plant Sci.
ISSN (print)	1360-1385
ISSN (online)	1878-4372
Scope	Plant Science