How to format your references using the Biology and Fertility of Soils citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Biology and Fertility of Soils. 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

Nachtsheim BJ (2014) Chemistry. Creating antioxidants by oxidation catalysis. Science 345:270–271

A journal article with 2 authors

Martienssen RA, Colot V (2001) DNA methylation and epigenetic inheritance in plants and filamentous fungi. Science 293:1070–1074

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang Y, Chen G, Zhang C (2013) Tunable spin-orbit coupling and quantum phase transition in a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate. Sci Rep 3:1937

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Braine J, Lisenfeld U, Duc PA, et al (2000) Formation of molecular gas in the tidal debris of violent galaxy-galaxy interactions. Nature 403:867–869

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Peat J, Elliott E, Baur L, Keena V (2002) Scientific Writing Easy when you know how. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., London, WC

An edited book

Williams IH (ed) (2010) Biocontrol-Based Integrated Management of Oilseed Rape Pests. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Majtner T, Yildirim-Yayilgan S, Hardeberg JY (2016) Efficient Melanoma Detection Using Texture-Based RSurf Features. In: Campilho A, Karray F (eds) Image Analysis and Recognition: 13th International Conference, ICIAR 2016, in Memory of Mohamed Kamel, Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, July 13-15, 2016, Proceedings. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 30–37

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 Biology and Fertility of Soils.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Scientists Unlock Secrets Of Earth’s Inner Core. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/physics/our-planet-s-inner-core-may-have-its-own-inner-core/. 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 (1973) Minicomputers. 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

Koner KM (2012) The development and validation of an instrument to measure wind ensemble error detection skills among instrumental music educators. 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

Lesch DW, Gelvin J (2017) What has Assad won? New York Times A10

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Nachtsheim 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Martienssen and Colot 2001; Nachtsheim 2014).

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

Two authors: (Martienssen and Colot 2001)
Three or more authors: (Braine et al. 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Biology and Fertility of Soils
Abbreviation	Biol. Fertil. Soils
ISSN (print)	0178-2762
ISSN (online)	1432-0789
Scope	Agronomy and Crop Science Soil Science Microbiology