How to format your references using the Plant Ecology citation style

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

Lewis R (2007) The hard cell. Nature 447:748–749

A journal article with 2 authors

Mirabel IF, Rodrigues I (2003) Formation of a black hole in the dark. Science 300:1119–1120

A journal article with 3 authors

Conaway RC, Brower CS, Conaway JW (2002) Emerging roles of ubiquitin in transcription regulation. Science 296:1254–1258

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Leakey MG, Spoor F, Brown FH, Gathogo PN, Kiarie C, Leakey LN, McDougall I (2001) New hominin genus from eastern Africa shows diverse middle Pliocene lineages. Nature 410:433–440

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Goldstein AP (2004) The Psychology of Group Aggression. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Nanz S (ed) (2011) The Future of Software Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Giga M-H, Giga Y, Saal J (2010) Compactness Theorems. In: Giga Y, Saal J (eds) Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations: Asymptotic Behavior of Solutions and Self-Similar Solutions. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA, pp 181–188

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 Ecology.

Blog post

Fang J (2015) Researchers Discover Enormous Ancient Crocodile That Walked Upright. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/carolina-butcher-croc-stalked-north-america-dinosaurs-arrived/. 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 (1973) Outlay Savings From Program Reductions and Terminations. 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

Truong T (2012) Microfluidics-based system for high-throughput analysis of nitrite in harbor water. 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

Stewart JB (2017) Musk Has Trump’s Ear, and Market Takes Note. New York Times B1

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lewis 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Mirabel and Rodrigues 2003; Lewis 2007).

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

Two authors: (Mirabel and Rodrigues 2003)
Three or more authors: (Leakey et al. 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Plant Ecology
Abbreviation	Plant Ecol.
ISSN (print)	1385-0237
ISSN (online)	1573-5052
Scope	Plant Science Ecology