How to format your references using the Plant Biotechnology Journal citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Plant Biotechnology Journal (PBJ). 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

Tobias, P.V. (2007) Retrospective: Francis Clark Howell (1925-2007). Science, 316, 995.

A journal article with 2 authors

Halloran, M.E. and Longini, I.M., Jr (2014) Emerging, evolving, and established infectious diseases and interventions. Science, 345, 1292–1294.

A journal article with 3 authors

De Moraes, C.M., Mescher, M.C., and Tumlinson, J.H. (2001) Caterpillar-induced nocturnal plant volatiles repel conspecific females. Nature, 410, 577–580.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Schönbächler, M., Rehkämper, M., Halliday, A.N., Lee, D.-C., Bourot-Denise, M., Zanda, B., et al. (2002) Niobium-zirconium chronometry and early solar system development. Science, 295, 1705–1708.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Simmons, M. and Dalgleish, E. (2006) Corporate Actions. Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

An edited book

Eggermont, J.J., Zeng, F.-G., Popper, A.N., and Fay, R.R. eds. (2012) Tinnitus. New York, NY: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Wachnik, B. (2016) Moral Hazard in IT Project Completion. An Analysis of Supplier and Client Behavior in Polish and German Enterprises. In: Information Technology for Management: Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, ISM 2015 and AITM 2015, Lodz, Poland, September 2015, Revised Selected Papers Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (Ziemba,E., ed) , pp. 77–90. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Biotechnology Journal.

Blog post

Carpineti, A. (2017) Dark Energy May Not Actually Exist. IFLScience.

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 (2016) Digital Service Programs: Assessing Results and Coordinating with Chief Information Officers Can Improve Delivery of Federal Projects. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Hebbard, M.T. (2015) A Depositional Analysis of the Reeves Sand in Beauregard and Allen Parishes, Louisiana.

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

Schweber, N., Barker, K., and Grant, J. (2014) In New Jersey, Young Players Recall Hazing. New York Times, A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Tobias, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Halloran and Longini, 2014; Tobias, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Halloran and Longini, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Schönbächler et al., 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Plant Biotechnology Journal
Abbreviation	Plant Biotechnol. J.
ISSN (print)	1467-7644
ISSN (online)	1467-7652
Scope	Agronomy and Crop Science Plant Science Biotechnology