How to format your references using the Tropical Plant Biology citation style

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

Ambros V (2001) Development. Dicing up RNAs. Science 293:811–813

A journal article with 2 authors

Xu G, Long G (2014) Universal nonadiabatic geometric gates in two-qubit decoherence-free subspaces. Sci Rep 4:6814

A journal article with 3 authors

Levine DI, Toffel MW, Johnson MS (2012) Randomized government safety inspections reduce worker injuries with no detectable job loss. Science 336:907–911

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Fang W, Lu H-L, King GF, St Leger RJ (2014) Construction of a hypervirulent and specific mycoinsecticide for locust control. Sci Rep 4:7345

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Rowlinson M (2016) A Practical Guide to the NEC3 Engineering and Construction Contract. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Wang J, Xiong H, Ishikawa Y, et al (eds) (2013) Web-Age Information Management: 14th International Conference, WAIM 2013, Beidaihe, China, June 14-16, 2013. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Reid C, Collins J, Singh M (2014) Global Teachers’ Pathways to Australia. In: Collins J, Singh M (eds) Global Teachers, Australian Perspectives: Goodbye Mr Chips, Hello Ms Banerjee. Springer, Singapore, pp 65–83

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 Tropical Plant Biology.

Blog post

Hale T (2017) California’s Famous Giant Sequoia “Tunnel Tree” Falls From Heavy Rain. In: IFLScience. 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 (1977) Collection Efforts Not Keeping Pace With Growing Number of Defaulted Student Loans. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Bunt E (2010) The saxophone works of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona

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

Gavin J (2017) The Divine One. New York Times BR22

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Ambros 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Ambros 2001; Xu and Long 2014).

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

Two authors: (Xu and Long 2014)
Three or more authors: (Fang et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Tropical Plant Biology
Abbreviation	Trop. Plant Biol.
ISSN (print)	1935-9756
ISSN (online)	1935-9764
Scope	Plant Science Genetics