How to format your references using the Australian Systematic Botany citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Australian Systematic Botany. 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

Smith C (2012) Microscopy: Two microscopes are better than one. Nature 492, 293–297.

A journal article with 2 authors

Etienne RS, Rosindell J (2012) Comment on ‘Global correlations in tropical tree species richness and abundance reject neutrality’. Science (New York, NY) 336, 1639; author reply 1639.

A journal article with 3 authors

Gormley WT Jr, Phillips D, Gayer T (2008) The early years. Preschool programs can boost school readiness. Science (New York, NY) 320, 1723–1724.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Mueller SN, Hosiawa-Meagher KA, Konieczny BT, Sullivan BM, Bachmann MF, Locksley RM, Ahmed R, Matloubian M (2007) Regulation of homeostatic chemokine expression and cell trafficking during immune responses. Science (New York, NY) 317, 670–674.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Glaser R (2015) ‘Symmetry, Spectroscopy, and Crystallography.’ (Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA: Weinheim, Germany)

An edited book

Jain R, Lee L (Eds) (2012) ‘Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) Composites for Infrastructure Applications: Focusing on Innovation, Technology Implementation and Sustainability.’ (Springer Netherlands: Dordrecht)

A chapter in an edited book

Dao-Tran M, Eiter T, Fink M, Krennwallner T (2011) First-Order Encodings for Modular Nonmonotonic Datalog Programs. ‘Datalog Reloaded: First International Workshop, Datalog 2010, Oxford, UK, March 16-19, 2010. Revised Selected Papers’. (Eds O de Moor, G Gottlob, T Furche, A Sellers) Lecture Notes in Computer Science. pp. 59–77. (Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg)

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 Australian Systematic Botany.

Blog post

Fang J (2015) Hubble Telescope Spots Smiley Face. IFLScience.

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) Business Systems Modernization: Internal Revenue Service’s Fiscal Year 2011 Expenditure Plan. U.S. Government Printing Office, GAO-12-26. (Washington, DC)

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Goldner VR (2010) Arizona nurses’ attitudes toward legislated minimum staffing ratios: Impact on the workplace. Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ.

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

Corkery M (2017) Deep Debt and Rivals Push Toy Chain Into Bankruptcy. New York Times B6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smith 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Etienne and Rosindell 2012; Smith 2012).

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

Two authors: (Etienne and Rosindell 2012)
Three or more authors: (Mueller et al. 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	Australian Systematic Botany
Abbreviation	Aust. Syst. Bot.
ISSN (print)	1030-1887
ISSN (online)	1446-5701
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Plant Science