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

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

Russo E (2003) Success in an uneven market. Nature 424:597.

A journal article with 2 authors

Doubleday R, Wilsdon J (2012) Science policy: Beyond the great and good. Nature 485:301–302.

A journal article with 3 authors

Dulac C, O’Connell LA, Wu Z (2014) Neural control of maternal and paternal behaviors. Science 345:765–770.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Zhang Y, Fan H, Xu J, et al. (2013) Network analysis reveals functional cross-links between disease and inflammation genes. Sci Rep 3:3426.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Cauvin C, Escobar F, Serradj A (2010) New Approaches in Thematic Cartography. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Sammes N (ed) (2006) Fuel Cell Technology: Reaching Towards Commercialization. London: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Varzi A (2016) On Drawing Lines Across the Board. In L Zaibert (ed). The Theory and Practice of Ontology. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 45–78.

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 Journal of Plant Ecology.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/some-spectacular-sem-images-microscopic-world/ (30 October 2018, date last accessed).

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 (1999) Year 2000 Computing Challenge: Agencies’ Reporting of Mission-Critical Classified Systems. 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

Koester A (2017) It All Started on a Lake. Doctoral dissertation. Southern Illinois 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

Santora M, Baker AL (2015) East Village Blast and Fire Fell Buildings and Hurt at Least 19. New York Times A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Russo 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Russo 2003; Doubleday and Wilsdon 2012).

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

Two authors: (Doubleday and Wilsdon 2012)
Three or more authors: (Zhang et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Plant Ecology
ISSN (print)	1752-9921
ISSN (online)	1752-993X
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Plant Science Ecology