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

Odling-Smee L (2007) Biofuels bandwagon hits a rut. Nature 446:483

A journal article with 2 authors

Jalil MBA, Tan SG (2014) Robustness of topological Hall effect of nontrivial spin textures. Sci Rep 4:5123

A journal article with 3 authors

Cronin TW, Caldwell RL, Marshall J (2001) Sensory adaptation. Tunable colour vision in a mantis shrimp. Nature 411:547–548

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Yin J, Gao F, Wei C, Lu Q (2014) Water amount dependence on morphologies and properties of ZnO nanostructures in double-solvent system. Sci Rep 4:3736

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Piegorsch WW, Bailer AJ (2005) Analyzing Environmental Data. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Hua G, Jégou H (eds) (2016) Computer Vision – ECCV 2016 Workshops: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 8-10 and 15-16, 2016, Proceedings, Part III. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Guruler H, Istanbullu A (2014) Modeling Student Performance in Higher Education Using Data Mining. In: Peña-Ayala A (ed) Educational Data Mining: Applications and Trends. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 105–124

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) Paralyzed Woman Flew A Fighter Jet Simulator Using Her Thoughts. 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 (2013) Biomedical Research: NIH Should Assess the Impact of Growth in Indirect Costs on Its Mission. 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

Peters AS (2017) Bread and Washoku: Unveiling Japanese Identity Through the Necessity of Bread Baking. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana 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

Kelly C (2013) You Loved My Film? Thanks, Man. Spare a Dime? New York Times A23B

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Odling-Smee 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Odling-Smee 2007; Jalil and Tan 2014).

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

Two authors: (Jalil and Tan 2014)
Three or more authors: (Yin et al. 2014)

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

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