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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Plant Research. 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

Stern P (2012) Depression. Defeating the dementors. Introduction. Science 338:67

A journal article with 2 authors

Skovran E, Martinez-Gomez NC (2015) Microbiology. Just add lanthanides. Science 348:862–863

A journal article with 3 authors

von Melchner L, Pallas SL, Sur M (2000) Visual behaviour mediated by retinal projections directed to the auditory pathway. Nature 404:871–876

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Reddy RA, Zhu C, Shao R, et al (2011) Spontaneous ferroelectric order in a bent-core smectic liquid crystal of fluid orthorhombic layers. Science 332:72–77

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Szeman I, O’Brien S (2017) Popular Culture. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Gurib-Fakim A, Eloff JN (eds) (2013) Chemistry for Sustainable Development in Africa. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Strange H, Zwiggelaar R (2014) Intrinsic Dimensionality. In: Zwiggelaar R (ed) Open Problems in Spectral Dimensionality Reduction. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 41–52

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 Journal of Plant Research.

Blog post

Fang J (2014) Beards: Too Hip For Their Own Good. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/beards-too-hip-their-own-good/. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (2012) Highlights of a Forum: Financial Literacy: Strengthening Partnerships in Challenging Times. 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

Wilbur LJ (2017) Perceptions of Missouri Public School Early Childhood Teachers and Administrators in Regard to Technology and Current Practices. Doctoral dissertation, Lindenwood 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

Kanter J (2017) Far-Right Leaders Loathe European Parliament, but Love Its Pay. New York Times A12

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Stern 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Stern 2012; Skovran and Martinez-Gomez 2015).

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

Two authors: (Skovran and Martinez-Gomez 2015)
Three or more authors: (Reddy et al. 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Plant Research
Abbreviation	J. Plant Res.
ISSN (print)	0918-9440
ISSN (online)	1618-0860
Scope	Plant Science

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