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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Plant Physiology. 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
Xu, X., 2013. Enhanced trion emission from colloidal quantum dots with photonic crystals by two-photon excitation. Sci. Rep. 3, 3228.
A journal article with 2 authors
Golde, T.E., Kukar, T.L., 2009. Medicine. Avoiding unintended toxicity. Science 324, 603–604.
A journal article with 3 authors
Cerda, E., Ravi-Chandar, K., Mahadevan, L., 2002. Thin films. Wrinkling of an elastic sheet under tension. Nature 419, 579–580.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Resulaj, A., Kiani, R., Wolpert, D.M., Shadlen, M.N., 2009. Changes of mind in decision-making. Nature 461, 263–266.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Pétrowski, A., Ben-Hamida, S., 2017. Evolutionary Algorithms. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.
An edited book
Woolf, N.J., 2010. Nanoneuroscience: Structural and Functional Roles of the Neuronal Cytoskeleton in Health and Disease, Biological and Medical Physics, Biomedical Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
A chapter in an edited book
Alpay, D., Colombo, F., Sabadini, I., 2015. Inner Product Spaces and Krein Spaces in the Quaternionic Setting, in: Alpay, D., Kirstein, B. (Eds.), Recent Advances in Inverse Scattering, Schur Analysis and Stochastic Processes: A Collection of Papers Dedicated to Lev Sakhnovich, Operator Theory: Advances and Applications. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 33–65.

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 Physiology.

Blog post
Andrew, E., 2014. Male Hummingbirds Use Beaks As Daggers To Stab Opponents’ Throats [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1986. Developing and Using Questionnaires (No. 130587). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
Schmittel, M., 2013. The Children First Foundation Parenting Education Program: A Study on the Effectiveness of a Divorce Parenting Education Program (Doctoral dissertation). Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL.

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
McKINLEY, J.C., Jr, 2017. Witness Lays Out Events Ending in Brazen Killing. New York Times A20.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Xu, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Golde and Kukar, 2009; Xu, 2013).

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

  • Two authors: (Golde and Kukar, 2009)
  • Three or more authors: (Resulaj et al., 2009)

About the journal

Full journal titleJournal of Plant Physiology
AbbreviationJ. Plant Physiol.
ISSN (print)0176-1617
ScopeAgronomy and Crop Science
Plant Science
Physiology

Other styles