How to format your references using the Frontiers in Plant-Microbe Interaction citation style

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

Jayaraman, K. S. (2002). Cutbacks cost jobs at agricultural institute. Nature 415, 949.

A journal article with 2 authors

Lichtman, J. W., and Denk, W. (2011). The big and the small: challenges of imaging the brain’s circuits. Science 334, 618–623.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kurtovic, A., Widmer, A., and Dickson, B. J. (2007). A single class of olfactory neurons mediates behavioural responses to a Drosophila sex pheromone. Nature 446, 542–546.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Ma, W., Alonso-González, P., Li, S., Nikitin, A. Y., Yuan, J., Martín-Sánchez, J., et al. (2018). In-plane anisotropic and ultra-low-loss polaritons in a natural van der Waals crystal. Nature 562, 557–562.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Alvarez, P. J. J., and Illman, W. A. (2005). Bioremediation and Natural Attenuation. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Kaźmierski, T. J., and Morawiec, A. eds. (2012). System Specification and Design Languages: Selected Contributions from FDL 2010., 1st Edn. New York, NY: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Veloso, E., and Guimarães, P. (2014). “Education and Empowerment in Later Life,” in Learning across Generations in Europe: Contemporary Issues in Older Adult Education, eds. B. Schmidt-Hertha, S. J. Krašovec, and M. Formosa (Rotterdam: SensePublishers), 35–45.

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-Microbe Interaction.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014). Scientists Discover Smallest Known Star. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/scientists-discover-smallest-known-star/ (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 (2017). Radioactive Sources: Opportunities Exist for Federal Agencies to Strengthen Transportation Security. 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

Pepper, I. (2010). On the Difference between Serialism and Seriality. New York, NY: Columbia 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

Greenhouse, L. (2008). In Court Ruling On Executions, A Factual Flaw. 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 (Jayaraman, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Jayaraman, 2002; Lichtman and Denk, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Lichtman and Denk, 2011)
Three or more authors: (Ma et al., 2018)

About the journal

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