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

DePinho, R.A. (2000) The Age of Cancer. Nature, 408, 248–254.

A journal article with 2 authors

Loayza, D. and De Lange, T. (2003) POT1 as a Terminal Transducer of TRF1 Telomere Length Control. Nature, 423, 1013–1018.

A journal article with 3 authors

Yan, W., Smith, C. and Cheng, L. (2013) Expanded Activity of Dimer Nucleases by Combining ZFN and TALEN for Genome Editing. Scientific reports, 3, 2376.

A journal article with 99 or more authors

Johannessen, O.M., Khvorostovsky, K., Miles, M.W. and Bobylev, L.P. (2005) Recent Ice-Sheet Growth in the Interior of Greenland. Science (New York, N.Y.), 310, 1013–1016.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bécherrawy, T. (2012) Electromagnetism. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Bach, V. and Delle Site, L., Eds. (2014) Many-Electron Approaches in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics: A Multidisciplinary View. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Kindler, S. and Kreienkamp, H.-J. (2012) The Role of the Postsynaptic Density in the Pathology of the Fragile X Syndrome. In: Denman, R.B., Ed., Modeling Fragile X Syndrome, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 61–80.

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, D. (2017, January 5) Why Some Girls Grow Breasts Early – And How New Findings Could Cut Cancer Risks. IFLScience, IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/why-some-girls-grow-breasts-early-and-how-new-findings-could-cut-cancer-risks/.

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. (1988) Railroad Safety: Accidents in Pennsylvania and Related Federal Enforcement Actions. 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

Nunn, T.N. (2014) A Puer–Senex Archetypal Model of the Therapeutic Relationship. Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, CA.

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

Kelly, M. (1992, September 28) THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: The Democrats; Clinton Uses Farm Speech to Begin New Offensive. New York Times, A13.

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

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