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

Morris MR (2004) Astronomy. Glimpsing matter at the brink. Science 304:689–692

A journal article with 2 authors

Daubin V, Moran NA (2004) Comment on “The origins of genome complexity.” Science 306:978; author reply 978

A journal article with 3 authors

Jansen VAA, Mashanova A, Petrovskii S (2012) Comment on “Lévy walks evolve through interaction between movement and environmental complexity.” Science 335:918; author reply 918

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Nidhin M, Vedhanayagam M, Sangeetha S, et al (2014) Fluorescent nanonetworks: a novel bioalley for collagen scaffolds and tissue engineering. Sci Rep 4:5968

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Mauthe A, Thomas P (2005) Professional Content Management Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Fernandez-Maloigne C (2013) Advanced Color Image Processing and Analysis. Springer, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Pawley JB (2006) Points, Pixels, and Gray Levels: Digitizing Image Data. In: Pawley JB (ed) Handbook Of Biological Confocal Microscopy. Springer US, Boston, MA, pp 59–79

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

Carpineti A (2016) Google Shows How Earth Has Changed In The Last 33 Years. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/google-shows-how-earth-has-changed-in-the-last-33-years/. 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 (2012) Financial Literacy: Overlap of Programs Suggests There May Be Opportunities for Consolidation. 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

Creason PJ (2015) The assessment of student learning outcomes at a California community college: Insight from faculty in a single department. 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

Branch J (2016) Congress Presses N.H.L. on Concussions. New 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	Agricultural Research
Abbreviation	Agric. Res.
ISSN (print)	2249-720X
ISSN (online)	2249-7218
Scope	Agronomy and Crop Science Food Science Plant Science

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