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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Glotzer SC. 2004. Materials science. Some Assembly Required. Science, 306:419–420.
A journal article with 2 authors
Roth MS & Deheyn DD. 2013. Effects of cold stress and heat stress on coral fluorescence in reef-building corals. Sci Rep, 3:1421.
A journal article with 3 authors
Yamamoto Y, Stock DW & Jeffery WR. 2004. Hedgehog signalling controls eye degeneration in blind cavefish. Nature, 431:844–847.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Lelieveld J, van Aardenne J, Fischer H et al. 2004. Increasing ozone over the Atlantic Ocean. Science, 304:1483–1487.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Kanel GC. 2017. Pathology of Liver Diseases, Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. p.
An edited book
Stella VJ, Borchardt RT, Hageman MJ et al. eds. 2007. Prodrugs: Challenges and Rewards Part 1, New York, NY: Springer. XVIII, 1464 p p.
A chapter in an edited book
Chou B-H & Suzuki E. 2010. Discovering Community-Oriented Roles of Nodes in a Social Network. In: Bach Pedersen T, Mohania MK, Tjoa AM, (eds.). Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery: 12th International Conference, DAWAK 2010, Bilbao, Spain, August/September 2010. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, p. 52–64.

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
Luntz S. 2014. Are Your Bacteria Making You Fat? IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/are-your-bacteria-making-you-fat/ [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. 1998. FCC: Maritime Communications, 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
Corral E. 2012. Latino undocumented students in Los Angeles: A grant proposal project. Doctoral dissertation. Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach.

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
Herrman J. 2016. Blue State. New York Times:MM50.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Glotzer 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Glotzer 2004; Roth & Deheyn 2013).

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

  • Two authors: (Roth & Deheyn 2013)
  • Three or more authors: (Lelieveld et al. 2004)

About the journal

Full journal titleCalifornia Agriculture
AbbreviationCalif. Agric. (Berkeley)
ISSN (print)0008-0845
ISSN (online)2160-8091
Scope

Other styles