How to format your references using the Plant Disease citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Plant Disease. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Gershon, D. 2004. In the market-place. Nature 432:243–245.
A journal article with 2 authors
McInerney, J. O., and Pisani, D. 2007. Genetics. Paradigm for life. Science 318:1390–1391.
A journal article with 3 authors
Gebauer, D., Völkel, A., and Cölfen, H. 2008. Stable prenucleation calcium carbonate clusters. Science 322:1819–1822.
A journal article with 7 or more authors
Xu, H.-B., Jiao, P.-C., Kang, B., Deng, J.-G., and Zhang, Y. 2013. Walkable dual emissions. Sci. Rep. 3:2199.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Hagen, J. 2017. Chemiereaktoren. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.
An edited book
Abrahamsen, P., Hauge, R., and Kolbjørnsen, O., eds. 2012. Geostatistics Oslo 2012. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.
A chapter in an edited book
Gomille, C. 2016. The Novelist’s Artistic Freedom v. His Protagonist’s Rights of Personality: A Comparison Between German and U.S.-American Law. In Flexibility in Modern Business Law: A Comparative Assessment, eds. Mark Fenwick and Stefan Wrbka. Tokyo: Springer Japan, pp. 69–87.

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 Disease.

Blog post
Andrew, D. 2016. How Citizen Scientists Discovered A Giant Cluster Of Galaxies. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/how-citizen-scientists-discovered-a-giant-cluster-of-galaxies/ (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. 1990. NASA ADP Procurement: Contracting and Market Share Information. 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
Malkus, N. 2012. Beneath the district averages: Intradistrict differences in teacher compensation expenditures. .

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
Witz, B., and Pilon, M. 2014. Stars’ Newest Must-Have Item: The Clippers. 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 (Gershon 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Gershon 2004; McInerney and Pisani 2007).

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

  • Two authors: (McInerney and Pisani 2007)
  • Three or more authors: (Xu et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal titlePlant Disease
AbbreviationPlant Dis.
ISSN (print)0191-2917
ScopeAgronomy and Crop Science
Plant Science

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