How to format your references using the American Journal of Plant Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for American Journal of Plant Sciences. 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

Flier, J.S. (2006) Neuroscience. Regulating Energy Balance: The Substrate Strikes Back. Science (New York, N.Y.), 312, 861–864.

A journal article with 2 authors

Pfeiffer, B.E. and Foster, D.J. (2013) Hippocampal Place-Cell Sequences Depict Future Paths to Remembered Goals. Nature, 497, 74–79.

A journal article with 3 authors

Good, S.P., Noone, D. and Bowen, G. (2015) WATER RESOURCES. Hydrologic Connectivity Constrains Partitioning of Global Terrestrial Water Fluxes. Science (New York, N.Y.), 349, 175–177.

A journal article with 99 or more authors

Qin, W., Gong, M., Shastry, T., Hersam, M.C. and Ren, S. (2014) Charge-Transfer Induced Magnetic Field Effects of Nano-Carbon Heterojunctions. Scientific reports, 4, 6126.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hahn, A., Behle, B., Lischewski, D. and Rein, W. (2002) Produktionstechnische Praxis. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany.

An edited book

Hayat, M.A., Ed. (2009) Colorectal Cancer. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Rothenbühler, I. (2006) Cultural Aspects of Vocational Rehabilitation Processes. In: Franchignoni, F., Ed., Vocational Rehabilitation, Springer, Paris, 53–67.

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 American Journal of Plant Sciences.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, August 5) National Geographic Changed Its Maps To Reflect The Effects Of Climate Change In The Arctic. IFLScience, IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/national-geographic-announces-change-its-maps-reflect-climate-change/.

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. (2011) Joint Strike Fighter: Restructuring Should Improve Outcomes, but Progress Is Still Lagging Overall. 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

Nevitt, D.S. (2017) Organic Geochemical Proxies as Indicators of Paleoenvironmental Conditions and Source Sediment Provenance in the Chenier Plain, Vermilion and Cameron Parishes, Louisiana, USA. Doctoral dissertation, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA.

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

Khodarkovsky, M. (2017, May 18) Russia’s Age-Old Identity Question. New York Times, 0.

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	American Journal of Plant Sciences
Abbreviation	Am. J. Plant Sci.
ISSN (print)	2158-2742
ISSN (online)	2158-2750
Scope