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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Plant Biotechnology Reports. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Korte M (2008) Neuroscience. A protoplasmic kiss to remember. Science 319:1627–1628

A journal article with 2 authors

Wimmer GE, Shohamy D (2012) Preference by association: how memory mechanisms in the hippocampus bias decisions. Science 338:270–273

A journal article with 3 authors

Connors M, Wiegert P, Veillet C (2011) Earth’s Trojan asteroid. Nature 475:481–483

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Reya T, Duncan AW, Ailles L, et al (2003) A role for Wnt signalling in self-renewal of haematopoietic stem cells. Nature 423:409–414

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Scott DW (2008) Color Atlas of Farm Animal Dermatology. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK

An edited book

Villmann T, Schleif F-M, Kaden M, Lange M (eds) (2014) Advances in Self-Organizing Maps and Learning Vector Quantization: Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop, WSOM 2014, Mittweida, Germany, July, 2-4, 2014. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Oelfke U, Nill S, Wilkens JJ (2006) Physical Optimization. In: Bortfeld T, Schmidt-Ullrich R, Neve WD, Wazer DE (eds) Image-Guided IMRT. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 31–45

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 Reports.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) The Curious Case Of A Man Who Thought His Reflection Was A Stranger. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/curious-case-man-who-thought-his-reflection-was-stranger/. 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 (2014) Maritime Administration: Ship Disposal Program Needs Improved Communications and Updated Strategic Plan. 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

Necaise KW (2012) Effects of soybean-derived phytoestrogens on reproductive tract development in neonatal male and female pigs: Animal model for the human infant. Doctoral dissertation, Mississippi State University

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

Wagner J (2017) Familia’s Surgery Has Mets Scrambling in the Bullpen. New York Times D2

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Korte 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Korte 2008; Wimmer and Shohamy 2012).

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

Two authors: (Wimmer and Shohamy 2012)
Three or more authors: (Reya et al. 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Plant Biotechnology Reports
Abbreviation	Plant Biotechnol. Rep.
ISSN (print)	1863-5466
ISSN (online)	1863-5474
Scope	Plant Science Biotechnology