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

Levi MA (2004) Dreaming of clean nukes. Nature 428:892

A journal article with 2 authors

Duan H, Sun C (2014) Swarm intelligence inspired shills and the evolution of cooperation. Sci Rep 4:5210

A journal article with 3 authors

Harding EJ, Paul ES, Mendl M (2004) Animal behaviour: cognitive bias and affective state. Nature 427:312

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Kurpiers P, Magnard P, Walter T, et al (2018) Deterministic quantum state transfer and remote entanglement using microwave photons. Nature 558:264–267

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Likhtenshtein G (2012) Solar Energy Conversion. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany

An edited book

Shurin MR, Thanavala Y, Ismail N (eds) (2015) Infection and Cancer: Bi-Directorial Interactions, 1st ed. 2015. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Urbinati A, Brambatti M (2015) Intracranial Bleeding. In: Capucci A (ed) Clinical Cases in Cardiology: A Guide to Learning and Practice. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 35–39

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 (2015) Scientists Predict Everest Could Be Ice-Free By The End Of This Century. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/scientists-predict-everest-could-lose-nearly-all-its-ice-within-century/. 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 (2007) Highway Emergency Relief: Reexamination Needed to Address Fiscal Imbalance and Long-term Sustainability. 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

Hasbini MA (2017) The Great Recession of 2007 and the Housing Market Crash: Why Did So Many Builders Fail? Lessons for the Local Homebuilding Industry. Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida

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

Hay G, Cyran R (2011) Long Road Back for Greek Banks. New York Times B2

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Levi 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Levi 2004; Duan and Sun 2014).

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

Two authors: (Duan and Sun 2014)
Three or more authors: (Kurpiers et al. 2018)

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

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