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

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

Subbaraman N (2014) Public health: A burning issue. Nature 513:S16-7

A journal article with 2 authors

Pasupathy A, Miller EK (2005) Different time courses of learning-related activity in the prefrontal cortex and striatum. Nature 433:873–876

A journal article with 3 authors

Paniello RC, Day JMD, Moynier F (2012) Zinc isotopic evidence for the origin of the Moon. Nature 490:376–379

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Hermans EJ, van Marle HJF, Ossewaarde L, et al (2011) Stress-related noradrenergic activity prompts large-scale neural network reconfiguration. Science 334:1151–1153

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Russell DL, Arlow PC (2015) Industrial Security. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Margottini C, Canuti P, Sassa K (eds) (2013) Landslide Science and Practice: Volume 1: Landslide Inventory and Susceptibility and Hazard Zoning. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Zhang NL (2007) Discovering Latent Structures: Experience with the CoIL Challenge 2000 Data Set. In: Shi Y, Albada GD van, Dongarra J, Sloot PMA (eds) Computational Science – ICCS 2007: 7th International Conference, Beijing, China, May 27 - 30, 2007, Proceedings, Part IV. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 26–34

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 Reporter.

Blog post

Fang J (2015) A New Parasite Is Infecting Tadpoles Across Three Continents. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/new-parasite-infecting-tadpoles-across-three-continents/. 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 (2015) Motor Carrier Safety: Additional Research Standards and Truck Drivers’ Schedule Data Could Allow More Accurate Assessments of the Hours of Service Rule. 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

Obiedat M (2015) Incrementally Sorted Lattice Data Structures. Doctoral dissertation, George Washington 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

Stewart JB (2017) Case Study in Chaos: Management Experts Grade a Trump White House. 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 (Subbaraman 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Pasupathy and Miller 2005; Subbaraman 2014).

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

Two authors: (Pasupathy and Miller 2005)
Three or more authors: (Hermans et al. 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	Plant Molecular Biology Reporter
Abbreviation	Plant Mol. Biol. Rep.
ISSN (print)	0735-9640
ISSN (online)	1572-9818
Scope	Plant Science Molecular Biology