How to format your references using the Placenta citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Placenta. 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
[1]
S. Corbel, Astronomy. Watching black holes spin, Science. 303 (2004) 1480–1481.
A journal article with 2 authors
[1]
B.R. Greening, N.H. Fefferman, Evolutionary significance of the role of family units in a broader social system, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 3608.
A journal article with 3 authors
[1]
V. Deroche-Gamonet, D. Belin, P.V. Piazza, Evidence for addiction-like behavior in the rat, Science. 305 (2004) 1014–1017.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
[1]
N.S. Sung, J.I. Gordon, G.D. Rose, E.D. Getzoff, S.J. Kron, D. Mumford, J.N. Onuchic, N.F. Scherer, D.L. Sumners, N.J. Kopell, Science education. Educating future scientists, Science. 301 (2003) 1485.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
[1]
B. Burd, Java® For Dummies®, Wiley Publishing, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2011.
An edited book
[1]
T. Valdez, J. Vallejo, eds., Infectious Diseases in Pediatric Otolaryngology: A Practical Guide, 1st ed. 2016, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016.
A chapter in an edited book
[1]
S. Glazer, C. Moliner, C. Carmona, An Integrated International Learning Model for Internationalizing I/O Psychology Programs, in: R.L. Griffith, L.F. Thompson, B.K. Armon (Eds.), Internationalizing the Curriculum in Organizational Psychology, Springer, New York, NY, 2014: pp. 79–103.

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 Placenta.

Blog post
[1]
J. Fang, Rock From Russia Contains 30,000 Diamonds, IFLScience. (2014).

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
[1]
Government Accountability Office, Federal Research: Concerns About the Superconducting Super Collider, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1992.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
[1]
N.E. Reese, The Ecomorphology of White-tailed Deer Lower Limb Bones Through the Holocene in Central North America, Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University, 2015.

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
[1]
G.G. Gustines, Comics Put the Pow In Power, New York Times. (2017) C1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal titlePlacenta
AbbreviationPlacenta
ISSN (print)0143-4004
ScopeDevelopmental Biology
Obstetrics and Gynaecology
Reproductive Medicine

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