How to format your references using the California Agriculture citation style

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

Sarewitz D. 2012. Blue-sky bias should be brought down to Earth. Nature, 481:7.

A journal article with 2 authors

Barbour DL & Wang X. 2003. Contrast tuning in auditory cortex. Science, 299:1073–1075.

A journal article with 3 authors

Faller M, Niederweis M & Schulz GE. 2004. The structure of a mycobacterial outer-membrane channel. Science, 303:1189–1192.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Chen D, Wang J, Chen T et al. 2013. Defect annihilation at grain boundaries in alpha-Fe. Sci Rep, 3:1450.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Harrison RG. 2014. Meteorological Measurements and Instrumentation, Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. p.

An edited book

Dinar A, Pochat V & Albiac-Murillo J eds. 2015. Water Pricing Experiences and Innovations, Cham: Springer International Publishing. XXV, 471 p. 64 illus., 39 illus. in color p.

A chapter in an edited book

Yang F, Lu H & Chen Y-W. 2011. Human Tracking by Multiple Kernel Boosting with Locality Affinity Constraints. In: Kimmel R, Klette R, Sugimoto A, (eds.). Computer Vision – ACCV 2010: 10th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, Queenstown, New Zealand, November 8-12, 2010, Revised Selected Papers, Part IV. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, p. 39–50.

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 California Agriculture.

Blog post

Hale T. 2016. The World’s Largest Pyramid Is Hidden Under A Hill. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/the-worlds-largest-pyramid-is-hidden-under-a-hill/ [Accessed October 30, 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. 2014. Department of Homeland Security: Actions Needed to Strengthen Management of Research and Development, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. p.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Simon PR. 2013. Gender grouping and its initial effect on a Title I upper elementary school during the pilot year of implementation. Doctoral dissertation. Mississippi State, MS: Mississippi State University.

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

Pilon M. 2012. Texas School Group Adjusts Schedule Policy. New York Times:B13.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sarewitz 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Sarewitz 2012; Barbour & Wang 2003).

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

Two authors: (Barbour & Wang 2003)
Three or more authors: (Chen et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	California Agriculture
Abbreviation	Calif. Agric. (Berkeley)
ISSN (print)	0008-0845
ISSN (online)	2160-8091
Scope