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

Cohen J (2000) AIDS MEETING: South African Leader Declines to Join the Chorus on HIV and AIDS. Science 289:222a

A journal article with 2 authors

Quasdorf KW, Overman LE (2014) Catalytic enantioselective synthesis of quaternary carbon stereocentres. Nature 516:181–191

A journal article with 3 authors

Wang M, Vijayraghavan S, Goldman-Rakic PS (2004) Selective D2 receptor actions on the functional circuitry of working memory. Science 303:853–856

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Xie C-L, Wang W-W, Zhang S-F, et al (2014) Continuous dopaminergic stimulation (CDS)-based treatment in Parkinson’s disease patients with motor complications: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sci Rep 4:6027

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Calloway J (2009) Becoming a Category of One. Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Lollino G, Manconi A, Guzzetti F, et al (eds) (2015) Engineering Geology for Society and Territory - Volume 5: Urban Geology, Sustainable Planning and Landscape Exploitation. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Hafez AI, Hassanien AE, Fahmy AA (2014) Testing Community Detection Algorithms: A Closer Look at Datasets. In: Panda M, Dehuri S, Wang G-N (eds) Social Networking: Mining, Visualization, and Security. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 85–99

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

Andrew D (2017) Wikileaks Vault 7 Reveals Staggering Breadth Of ‘Cia Hacking.’ In: IFLScience. 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 (2009) Financial Management Systems: DHS Faces Challenges to Successfully Consolidating Its Existing Disparate Systems. 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

Luong W (2009) An identity building program for American-born children of Southeast Asian refugees. 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

Bilton N (2013) All Is Fair in Love and Twitter. New York Times MM22

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Cohen 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Cohen 2000; Quasdorf and Overman 2014).

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

Two authors: (Quasdorf and Overman 2014)
Three or more authors: (Xie et al. 2014)

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