How to format your references using the Plant and Soil citation style

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

Jensen GJ (2009) Cell biology. Protein filaments caught in the act. Science 323:472–473

A journal article with 2 authors

Shirey PD, Lamberti GA (2011) Regulate trade in rare plants. Nature 469:465–467

A journal article with 3 authors

Polyak V, Hill C, Asmerom Y (2008) Age and evolution of the Grand Canyon revealed by U-Pb dating of water table-type speleothems. Science 319:1377–1380

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Miaudet P, Derré A, Maugey M, et al (2007) Shape and temperature memory of nanocomposites with broadened glass transition. Science 318:1294–1296

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Huang F, Klette R, Scheibe K (2008) Panoramic Imaging. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Tejchman J (2013) Continuous and Discontinuous Modelling of Fracture in Concrete Using FEM. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Miyazawa T, Nishine H (2013) Evaluating Outcomes After Interventional Procedures. In: Díaz-Jimenez JP, Rodriguez AN (eds) Interventions in Pulmonary Medicine. Springer, New York, NY, pp 71–77

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 Plant and Soil.

Blog post

Davis J (2016) There May Be Twice As Many Species Of Birds Than Is Currently Recognized. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/there-may-be-twice-as-many-species-of-birds-than-is-currently-recognized/. 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 (2010) Campaign Finance Reform: Experiences of Two States That Offered Full Public Funding for Political Candidates. 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

Koyanagi T (2017) Design and Synthesis of Archaea-Inspired Tetraether Lipids. Doctoral dissertation, University of California San Diego

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

Brantley B (2017) Theater; The Class Divide, And Its Lessons. New York Times AR2

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Jensen 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Jensen 2009; Shirey and Lamberti 2011).

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

Two authors: (Shirey and Lamberti 2011)
Three or more authors: (Miaudet et al. 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	Plant and Soil
Abbreviation	Plant Soil
ISSN (print)	0032-079X
ISSN (online)	1573-5036
Scope	Plant Science Soil Science