How to format your references using the Organic Agriculture citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Organic Agriculture. 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.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
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
Emsley J (2001) Good news is no news. Nature 413:113
A journal article with 2 authors
Seeber L, Armbruster JG (2000) Earthquakes as beacons of stress change. Nature 407:69–72
A journal article with 3 authors
Dietz T, Ostrom E, Stern PC (2003) The struggle to govern the commons. Science 302:1907–1912
A journal article with 5 or more authors
Gao PX, Ding Y, Mai W, et al (2005) Conversion of zinc oxide nanobelts into superlattice-structured nanohelices. Science 309:1700–1704

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Hoffmann W (2014) The Economic Competitiveness of Renewable Energy. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ
An edited book
Lyubimov D (2013) Micromechanisms of Friction and Wear: Introduction to Relativistic Tribology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
A chapter in an edited book
Müller M, Pfahl D (2008) Simulation Methods. In: Shull F, Singer J, Sjøberg DIK (eds) Guide to Advanced Empirical Software Engineering. Springer, London, pp 117–152

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 Organic Agriculture.

Blog post
Fang J (2014) Make Your Own Droplet Microscope Lens for a Penny. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/make-your-own-droplet-microscope-lens-penny/. 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 (1979) Immigration and Naturalization Service Proposed Procurement of Automated Data Processing Equipment To Streamline and Update Office Procedures. 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
Lin H-C (2013) Depression screening in ambulatory care. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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
Vasquez E (2015) A Life Without Papers. New York Times A19

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Emsley 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Seeber and Armbruster 2000; Emsley 2001).

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

  • Two authors: (Seeber and Armbruster 2000)
  • Three or more authors: (Gao et al. 2005)

About the journal

Full journal titleOrganic Agriculture
ISSN (print)1879-4238
ISSN (online)1879-4246
ScopeGeneral Agricultural and Biological Sciences

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