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

van der Greef J (2011) Perspective: All systems go. Nature 480:S87

A journal article with 2 authors

Maxfield FR, Tabas I (2005) Role of cholesterol and lipid organization in disease. Nature 438:612–621

A journal article with 3 authors

Benton R, Vannice KS, Vosshall LB (2007) An essential role for a CD36-related receptor in pheromone detection in Drosophila. Nature 450:289–293

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Ghosh A, Praefcke GJK, Renault L, et al (2006) How guanylate-binding proteins achieve assembly-stimulated processive cleavage of GTP to GMP. Nature 440:101–104

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Levin MA, Kalal TT (2005) Improving Product Reliability. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

van der Hoek W, Holliday WH, Wang W-F (eds) (2015) Logic, Rationality, and Interaction: 5th International Workshop, LORI 2015, Taipei, Taiwan, October 28-30, 2015. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Rezaizadeh H, Olson E (2016) Inflammatory Bowel Disease. In: Wu GY (ed) Pocket Handbook of GI Pharmacotherapeutics. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 45–63

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

Carpineti A (2017) New “Natural Disasters” Report Reveals Billions Of People Worldwide At Risk. 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 (1971) Close Air Support: Principal Issues and Aircraft Choices. 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

Beck J (2010) Community based human trafficking awareness program: A grant proposal project. 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

(nyt) SK (2004) World Briefing | Europe: Russia: Prison For Bombings Investigator. New York Times A12

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (van der Greef 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Maxfield and Tabas 2005; van der Greef 2011).

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

Two authors: (Maxfield and Tabas 2005)
Three or more authors: (Ghosh et al. 2006)

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