How to format your references using the Agricultural Research citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Agricultural Research. 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

Bonetta L (2006) Protein purification: protein purification for structural proteomics. Nature 439:1018

A journal article with 2 authors

Hébert SS, De Strooper B (2007) Molecular biology. miRNAs in neurodegeneration. Science 317:1179–1180

A journal article with 3 authors

Comas D, Petit F, Preat T (2004) Drosophila long-term memory formation involves regulation of cathepsin activity. Nature 430:460–463

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Gordon JR, Goodman MH, Potter MF, Haynes KF (2014) Population variation in and selection for resistance to pyrethroid-neonicotinoid insecticides in the bed bug. Sci Rep 4:3836

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ratliff TA (2005) The Laboratory Quality Assurance System. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Ketter W, Poutré HL, Sadeh N, et al (2010) Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce and Trading Agent Design and Analysis: AAMAS Workshop, AMEC 2008, Estoril, Portugal, May 12-16, 2008, and AAAI Workshop, TADA 2008, Chicago, IL, USA, July 14, 2008, Revised Selected Papers. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Larche MJ (2015) Inflammatory Arthritides. In: O’Neill J (ed) Essential Imaging in Rheumatology. Springer, New York, NY, pp 105–146

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 Agricultural Research.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Latest Beautiful Photo From NASA Shows The Moon And The ISS. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/latest-beautiful-photo-nasa-shows-moon-and-iss/. 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 (1996) Transportation Issue Area: Active Assignments. 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

Tu KN (2013) Novel bivalent organophosphates as inhibitors of butyrylcholinesterase — Compounds with potential for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and studies in the development of asymmetric catalytic Kabachnik-Fields reaction. Doctoral dissertation, 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

Hodgman J (2016) Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman. New York Times MM20

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	Agricultural Research
Abbreviation	Agric. Res.
ISSN (print)	2249-720X
ISSN (online)	2249-7218
Scope	Agronomy and Crop Science Food Science Plant Science