How to format your references using the Agronomy for Sustainable Development citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Agronomy for Sustainable Development. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Smaglik P (2003) Chemistry’s clouded view. Nature 421:295
A journal article with 2 authors
Kershaw MH, Smyth MJ (2013) Immunology. Making macrophages eat cancer. Science 341:41–42
A journal article with 3 authors
Alkire MT, Hudetz AG, Tononi G (2008) Consciousness and anesthesia. Science 322:876–880
A journal article with 5 or more authors
Shi Z, Zhang Y, Cui X, et al (2014) High-temperature continuous-wave laser realized in hollow microcavities. Sci Rep 4:7180

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Guyader J-L (2013) Vibration in Continuous Media. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ
An edited book
Beaudry MC, Symonds J (eds) (2011) Interpreting the Early Modern World: Transatlantic Perspectives. Springer US, Boston, MA
A chapter in an edited book
Howard AM, Remy S, Hyuk Park C, et al (2009) Intelligent Robotics for Assistive Healthcare and Therapy. In: Sukhatme G (ed) The Path to Autonomous Robots: Essays in Honor of George A. Bekey. Springer US, Boston, MA, pp 1–17

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 Agronomy for Sustainable Development.

Blog post
Fang J (2016) Starving Microscopic Algae Will Digest Themselves. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/starving-microscopic-algae-will-digest-themselves/. 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 (1982) Strong Central Management of Office Automation Will Boost Productivity. 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
Horvath CP (2012) Comparison of waste heat driven and electrically driven cooling systems for a high ambient temperature, off-grid application. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park

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
Ryerson J (2017) University Presses. New York Times BR27

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smaglik 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Smaglik 2003; Kershaw and Smyth 2013).

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

  • Two authors: (Kershaw and Smyth 2013)
  • Three or more authors: (Shi et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleAgronomy for Sustainable Development
AbbreviationAgron. Sustain. Dev.
ISSN (print)1774-0746
ISSN (online)1773-0155
ScopeAgronomy and Crop Science
Environmental Engineering

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