How to format your references using the International Journal of Plant Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for International Journal of Plant Sciences (IJPS). 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

DeLong EF 2009 The microbial ocean from genomes to biomes. Nature 459:200–206.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kanematsu Y, K Takahashi 2007 Employing Japan’s postdocs. Nature 447:1028.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bloch I I, TW Hansch, T Esslinger 2000 Measurement of the spatial coherence of a trapped Bose gas at the phase transition. Nature 403:166–170.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Luo J, MG Kaplitt, HL Fitzsimons, DS Zuzga, Y Liu, ML Oshinsky, MJ During 2002 Subthalamic GAD gene therapy in a Parkinson’s disease rat model. Science 298:425–429.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Donham KJ, A Thelin 2016 Agricultural Medicine. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Contopoulos G, PA Patsis eds. 2009 Chaos in Astronomy: Conference 2007. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Rijken C, R Römkens 2011 Trafficking for Sexual Purposes as a Globalized Shadow Economy: Human Security as the Tool to Facilitate a Human Rights Based Approach. In: Letschert R, van Dijk J, editors. The New Faces of Victimhood: Globalization, Transnational Crimes and Victim Rights. Studies in Global Justice. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. p. 73–98.

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 International Journal of Plant Sciences.

Blog post

Andrew E 2015 Feb 22 Drug-Resistant Malaria Detected In India. IFLScience. [accessed 2018 Oct 30]. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/drug-resistant-malaria-threatens-india-could-spread-africa/

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 1994 Amtrak: Financial Condition Has Deteriorated and Future Costs Make Recovery Difficult. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Bilbrey J 2017 The Positive Effects Extrinsic Motivation Can Have on Intrinsic Motivation in a Math Classroom [Doctoral dissertation]. Scottsdale, AZ: Northcentral 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

Wagner J 2017 Oct 27 Houston’s Bregman Works on Hitting, Fielding and Spanish. New York Times:SP2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (DeLong 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Kanematsu and Takahashi 2007; DeLong 2009).

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

Two authors: (Kanematsu and Takahashi 2007)
Three or more authors: (Luo et al. 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	International Journal of Plant Sciences
Abbreviation	Int. J. Plant Sci.
ISSN (print)	1058-5893
ISSN (online)	1537-5315
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Plant Science

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