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 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

McNutt, M. (2014) A new look. Science 344, 781

A journal article with 2 authors

Turgeon, S.C. and Creaser, R.A. (2008) Cretaceous oceanic anoxic event 2 triggered by a massive magmatic episode. Nature 454, 323–326

A journal article with 3 authors

Thomas, D.S.G. et al. (2005) Remobilization of southern African desert dune systems by twenty-first century global warming. Nature 435, 1218–1221

A journal article with 3 or more authors

Gilbert, D.A. et al. (2014) Quantitative decoding of interactions in tunable nanomagnet arrays using first order reversal curves. Sci. Rep. 4, 4204

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Langton, R. (2006) Stability and Control of Aircraft Systems, John Wiley & Sons Ltd

An edited book

Toni, B., ed. (2016) Mathematical Sciences with Multidisciplinary Applications: In Honor of Professor Christiane Rousseau. And In Recognition of the Mathematics for Planet Earth Initiative, 157, Springer International Publishing

A chapter in an edited book

Su, X. et al. (2010) A Framework to Enable Two-Layer Inference for Ambient Intelligence. In Ambient Intelligence and Future Trends-International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence (ISAmI 2010) (Augusto, J. C. et al., eds), pp. 29–36, Springer

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

Davis, J. (2015) Parasitic Beetle Mimics Ants By “Speaking” Three Different “Languages”. IFLScience. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/parasitic-beetle-mimics-ants-speaking-three-different-languages/. [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 (1978) Subcontractor’s Problems With Prime Contractor at Kennedy Space Center, 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

Roberts, J.E. (2010) Process evaluation of the Instant Word Notebook. Doctoral dissertation, Lindenwood 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

Shpigel, B. (2016) For a Second Time This Year, Rio Defies the OddsNew York Times, B10

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