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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Frontiers in Plant Biotechnology. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Short, R. V. (2000). Where do babies come from? Nature 403, 705.

A journal article with 2 authors

Pfeiffer, B. E., and Foster, D. J. (2015). PLACE CELLS. Autoassociative dynamics in the generation of sequences of hippocampal place cells. Science 349, 180–183.

A journal article with 3 authors

Petrides, M., Cadoret, G., and Mackey, S. (2005). Orofacial somatomotor responses in the macaque monkey homologue of Broca’s area. Nature 435, 1235–1238.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Garcia-Perez, J. L., Morell, M., Scheys, J. O., Kulpa, D. A., Morell, S., Carter, C. C., et al. (2010). Epigenetic silencing of engineered L1 retrotransposition events in human embryonic carcinoma cells. Nature 466, 769–773.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Obayya, S. (2010). Computational Photonics. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Jeschke, M. G., Kamolz, L.-P., and Shahrokhi, S. eds. (2013). Burn Care and Treatment: A Practical Guide. Vienna: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Crain, T., Imbs, D., and Raynal, M. (2012). “Towards a Universal Construction for Transaction-Based Multiprocess Programs,” in Distributed Computing and Networking: 13th International Conference, ICDCN 2012, Hong Kong, China, January 3-6, 2012. Proceedings, eds. L. Bononi, A. K. Datta, S. Devismes, and A. Misra (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 61–75.

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 Biotechnology.

Blog post

Andrew, D. (2016). ‘Canary Species’ Can Sing Songs That Warn Of Ecosystem Collapse. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/canary-species-can-sing-songs-that-warn-of-ecosystem-collapse/ (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 (2012). Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education: Strategic Planning Needed to Better Manage Overlapping Programs across Multiple Agencies. 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

Friedlander, M. B. (2014). Limited Sight Distance. 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

(nyt), S. K. (2002). World Briefing | Europe: Ukraine: More Blamed In Air Disaster. New York Times, A7.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Short, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Short, 2000; Pfeiffer and Foster, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Pfeiffer and Foster, 2015)
Three or more authors: (Garcia-Perez et al., 2010)

About the journal

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