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

Waxman E (2007) Neutrino astrophysics: a new tool for exploring the universe. Science 315:63–65

A journal article with 2 authors

Stocker R, Durham WM (2009) Microbiology. Tumbling for stealth? Science 325:400–402

A journal article with 3 authors

Gottfried JA, O’Doherty J, Dolan RJ (2003) Encoding predictive reward value in human amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex. Science 301:1104–1107

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Piccirillo SGM, Reynolds BA, Zanetti N, et al (2006) Bone morphogenetic proteins inhibit the tumorigenic potential of human brain tumour-initiating cells. Nature 444:761–765

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Smith C, Meeking D (2013) How to Succeed at the Medical Interview. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

De Falco M, Basile A (eds) (2016) Enriched Methane: The First Step Towards the Hydrogen Economy. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Caelli W, Liu V, Longley D (2013) Background to the Development of a Curriculum for the History of “Cyber” and “Communications” Security. In: Dodge RC, Futcher L (eds) Information Assurance and Security Education and Training: 8th IFIP WG 11.8 World Conference on Information Security Education, WISE 8, Auckland, New Zealand, July 8-10, 2013, Proceedings, WISE 7, Lucerne Switzerland, June 9-10, 2011, and WISE 6, Bento Gonçalves, RS, Brazil, July 27-31, 2009, Revised Selected Papers. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 39–47

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

O`Callaghan J (2017) Aliens Will Probably Be Machines, Not Little Green Men, Says SETI Expert. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/aliens-will-probably-be-machines/. 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 (1990) Observations on Ohio’s Implementation of the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act of 1986. 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

Chitrampalam P (2009) Biological control of lettuce drop caused by Sclerotinia spp. using Coniothyrium minitans and elucidation of biochemical interactions during mycoparasitism. Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona

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

Grisham J (2017) John Grisham’s Suggestions for Writing Popular Fiction. New York Times BR31

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Waxman 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Waxman 2007; Stocker and Durham 2009).

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

Two authors: (Stocker and Durham 2009)
Three or more authors: (Piccirillo et al. 2006)

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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