How to format your references using the Agronomy Journal citation style

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

Fabbiano, G. 2005. Astronomy. The hunt for intermediate-mass black holes. Science 307(5709): 533–534.

A journal article with 2 authors

Li, G., and J. Zhang. 2014. Ultra-broadband and efficient surface plasmon polariton launching through metallic nanoslits of subwavelength period. Sci. Rep. 4: 5914.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kunchulia, M., K.S. Pilz, and M.H. Herzog. 2014. Small effects of smoking on visual spatiotemporal processing. Sci. Rep. 4: 7316.

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Sakamoto, Y., M. Kaneda, O. Terasaki, D.Y. Zhao, J.M. Kim, et al. 2000. Direct imaging of the pores and cages of three-dimensional mesoporous materials. Nature 408(6811): 449–453.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ruske, W. 1971. Verlag Chemie 1921-1971. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany.

An edited book

Li, J. 2011. Risk Management of Supply and Cash Flows in Supply Chains (J. Chen and S. Wang, editors). Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

Poirier, L., R. de Cabo, and S. Zou. 2010. Dietary Restriction and Aging in Drosophila Melanogaster. In: Everitt, A.V., Rattan, S.I.S., Couteur, D.G. le, and Cabo, R. de, editors, Calorie Restriction, Aging and Longevity. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht. p. 79–95

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 Journal.

Blog post

Hamilton, K. 2015. How To Win At Rock-Paper-Scissors With Science. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/how-win-rock-paper-scissors/ (accessed 30 October 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. 1991. Traffic Congestion: The Need and Opportunity for Federal Involvement. 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

Glock, M. 2008. Cultural futuristics: Bringing consciousness to cultural complexes and soul to scenario based planning.

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

Crow, K. 2002. My Son the Bureaucrat, My Dad the Gadfly. New York Times: 143.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Fabbiano, 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Fabbiano, 2005; Li and Zhang, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Li and Zhang, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Sakamoto et al., 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Agronomy Journal
Abbreviation	Agron. J.
ISSN (print)	1435-0645
Scope	Agronomy and Crop Science