How to format your references using the Botany citation style

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

Burns, J.A. 2010. The four hundred years of planetary science since Galileo and Kepler. Nature 466(7306): 575–584.

A journal article with 2 authors

Ketting, R.F., and Plasterk, R.H. 2000. A genetic link between co-suppression and RNA interference in C. elegans. Nature 404(6775): 296–298.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kasuya, A., Sakabe, J.-I., and Tokura, Y. 2014. Potential application of in vivo imaging of impaired lymphatic duct to evaluate the severity of pressure ulcer in mouse model. Sci. Rep. 4: 4173.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Freedman, B., Bartal, G., Segev, M., Lifshitz, R., Christodoulides, D.N., and Fleischer, J.W. 2006. Wave and defect dynamics in nonlinear photonic quasicrystals. Nature 440(7088): 1166–1169.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Koch, S.N., Torres, S.M.F., and Plumb, D.C. 2012. Canine and Feline Dermatology Drug Handbook. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd,., West Sussex, UK.

An edited book

Bertrand, J.-C., Caumette, P., Lebaron, P., Matheron, R., Normand, P., and Sime-Ngando, T. (Editors). 2015. Environmental Microbiology: Fundamentals and Applications: Microbial Ecology. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Masud, M.M., and Kiringa, I. 2007. Collaborative Data Synchronization in an Instance-Mapped P2P Data Sharing System. In On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2007: OTM 2007 Workshops: OTM Confederated International Workshops and Posters, AWeSOMe, CAMS, OTM Academy Doctoral Consortium, MONET, OnToContent, ORM, PerSys, PPN, RDDS, SSWS, and SWWS 2007, Vilamoura, Portugal, November 25-30, 2007, Proceedings, Part I. Edited by R. Meersman, Z. Tari, and P. Herrero. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. pp. 7–8.

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 Botany.

Blog post

Andrew, E. 2014, July 31. Our Galaxy Is Much Lighter Than We Thought. IFLScience. Available from https://www.iflscience.com/space/our-galaxy-much-lighter-we-thought/ [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. 2010. Aviation and the Environment: Systematically Addressing Environmental Impacts and Community Concerns Can Help Airports Reduce Project Delays. 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

Mosher, L. 2008. The relationship between Christian literature and executive leader performance. 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

Burton, S. 2015, October 21. How to Talk to Strangers. New York Times: MM34.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Burns 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Ketting and Plasterk 2000; Burns 2010).

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

Two authors: (Ketting and Plasterk 2000)
Three or more authors: (Freedman et al. 2006)

About the journal

Full journal title	Botany
Abbreviation	Botany
ISSN (print)	1916-2790
ISSN (online)	1916-2804
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Plant Science Ecology