How to format your references using the Plant Molecular Biology citation style

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

Funk CD (2001) Prostaglandins and leukotrienes: advances in eicosanoid biology. Science 294:1871–1875

A journal article with 2 authors

Jones AG, Ferguson IJ (2001) The electric Moho. Nature 409:331–333

A journal article with 3 authors

Archibald JD, Averianov AO, Ekdale EG (2001) Late Cretaceous relatives of rabbits, rodents, and other extant eutherian mammals. Nature 414:62–65

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Wang C, He Q, Halim U, Liu Y, Zhu E, Lin Z, Xiao H, Duan X, Feng Z, Cheng R, Weiss NO, Ye G, Huang Y-C, Wu H, Cheng H-C, Shakir I, Liao L, Chen X, Goddard WA III, Huang Y, Duan X (2018) Monolayer atomic crystal molecular superlattices. Nature 555:231–236

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Dayton G (2014) Trade Mindfully. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Akbarnia BA, Yazici M, Thompson GH (eds) (2016) The Growing Spine: Management of Spinal Disorders in Young Children, 2nd ed. 2016. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Wagatsuma K, Harada T, Anze S, Goto Y, Cheng J (2016) A Supporting Tool for Spiral Model of Cryptographic Protocol Design with Reasoning-Based Formal Analysis. In: Park JJ (jong H, Chao H-C, Arabnia H, Yen NY (eds) Advanced Multimedia and Ubiquitous Engineering: Future Information Technology Volume 2. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 25–32

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 Molecular Biology.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Baby Beluga Whale Born At Georgia Aquarium Has Died. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/baby-beluga-whale-born-georgia-aquarium-has-died/. 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 (1989) Supplemental Student Loans: Who Borrows and Who Defaults. 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

Kamis RP (2013) The Relationship between Expanded Concepts of Self and Well-Being. Doctoral dissertation, Northcentral 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

Kishkovsky S (2008) Pregnant Inmate’s Plight Inspires Plea to Medvedev. New York Times A8

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Funk 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Jones and Ferguson 2001; Funk 2001).

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

Two authors: (Jones and Ferguson 2001)
Three or more authors: (Wang et al. 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Plant Molecular Biology
Abbreviation	Plant Mol. Biol.
ISSN (print)	0167-4412
ISSN (online)	1573-5028
Scope	Agronomy and Crop Science Plant Science Genetics General Medicine