How to format your references using the Current Plant Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Current Plant Biology. 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

[1]

J.N. Spitale, Asteroid hazard mitigation using the Yarkovsky effect, Science. 296 (2002) 77.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

M.J. Higgins, S.J.H. Graham, Intellectual property. Balancing innovation and access: patent challenges tip the scales, Science. 326 (2009) 370–371.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

U.P. Davé, N.A. Jenkins, N.G. Copeland, Gene therapy insertional mutagenesis insights, Science. 303 (2004) 333.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

D. Tilman, J. Fargione, B. Wolff, C. D’Antonio, A. Dobson, R. Howarth, D. Schindler, W.H. Schlesinger, D. Simberloff, D. Swackhamer, Forecasting agriculturally driven global environmental change, Science. 292 (2001) 281–284.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

A.K. Hartmann, M. Weigt, Phase Transitions in Combinatorial Optimization Problems, Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, FRG, 2005.

An edited book

[1]

K. Vitale, ed., Environmental and Food Safety and Security for South-East Europe and Ukraine, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2012.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Y. Hammal, A Formal Semantics of UML StateCharts by Means of Timed Petri Nets, in: F. Wang (Ed.), Formal Techniques for Networked and Distributed Systems - FORTE 2005: 25th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, Taipei, Taiwan, October 2-5, 2005. Proceedings, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2005: pp. 38–52.

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 Current Plant Biology.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, These Creepy X-Rays Will Make You Look At People In A Whole New Light, IFLScience. (2015).

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Information Technology: Management Improvements Needed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Infrastructure Modernization Program, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2005.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

E.S. Agbi, Shadow economy and the related issues of tax evasion: A comparative analysis among Canadian workers, Doctoral dissertation, Northcentral University, 2010.

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

[1]

J. Leguizamo, … I Faced a Hostile Audience (Kids), New York Times. (2017) AR8.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Current Plant Biology
Abbreviation	Curr. Plant Biol.
ISSN (print)	2214-6628
Scope	Plant Science Biochemistry Cell Biology Developmental Biology Genetics