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 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

Grayson M (2011) Biofuels. Nature 474:S1

A journal article with 2 authors

Zhang K-Q, Liu XY (2004) In situ observation of colloidal monolayer nucleation driven by an alternating electric field. Nature 429:739–743

A journal article with 3 authors

Egholm DL, Knudsen MF, Sandiford M (2013) Lifespan of mountain ranges scaled by feedbacks between landsliding and erosion by rivers. Nature 498:475–478

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Brileya KA, Connolly JM, Downey C, et al (2013) Taxis toward hydrogen gas by Methanococcus maripaludis. Sci Rep 3:3140

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Meschede D (2017) Optics, Light, and Lasers. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany

An edited book

Massoud A, Rezaei N (eds) (2014) Immunology of Aging. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Abbas MA, Qadir MA, Ahmad M, Ali T (2012) Semantic Aware Implication and Satisfiability for Conjunctive Queries in Semantic Caching. In: Benlamri R (ed) Networked Digital Technologies: 4th International Conference, NDT 2012, Dubai, UAE, April 24-26, 2012. Proceedings, Part I. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 44–54

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

Andrews R (2015) El Niño Brings Venomous Sea Snakes To California. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/el-ni-o-brings-venomous-sea-snakes-california/. 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 (1994) Pell Grants for Prison Inmates. 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

Lingley-Papadopoulos CA (2008) Image analysis of Optical Coherence Tomography images of the urinary bladder for the recognition of bladder cancer. Doctoral dissertation, George Washington 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

Hollander S (2009) Why the Smoke Doesn’t Get in Their Eyes. New York Times CY6

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Grayson 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Zhang and Liu 2004; Grayson 2011).

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

Two authors: (Zhang and Liu 2004)
Three or more authors: (Brileya et al. 2013)

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