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

Keppler H (2014) Geology: Earth’s deep water reservoir. Nature 507:174–175

A journal article with 2 authors

Knudsen BM, Andersen SB (2001) Geophysics. Longitudinal variation in springtime ozone trends. Nature 413:699–700

A journal article with 3 authors

Joughin I, Smith BE, Medley B (2014) Marine ice sheet collapse potentially under way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica. Science 344:735–738

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Brierley CM, Fedorov AV, Liu Z, et al (2009) Greatly expanded tropical warm pool and weakened Hadley circulation in the early Pliocene. Science 323:1714–1718

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Jay SA (2006) High Voltage Electricity Installations. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, England

An edited book

Eshach H (ed) (2006) Science Literacy in Primary Schools and Pre-Schools. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Kehrl JH, Hwang I-Y, Park C (2009) Chemoattract Receptor Signaling and Its Role in Lymphocyte Motility and Trafficking. In: Dustin M, McGavern D (eds) Visualizing Immunity. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 107–127

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

Luntz S (2015) Nitrogen-Fed Bacteria Could Power Our Future. 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 (1997) Space Station: Cost Control Problems. 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

Lyngarkos B (2015) Examination of the relative importance of website elements for users of manufacturers representative websites. 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

Alexander K (2001) The Day My Free Computer Music Died. New York Times 96

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Keppler 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Knudsen and Andersen 2001; Keppler 2014).

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

Two authors: (Knudsen and Andersen 2001)
Three or more authors: (Brierley et al. 2009)

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

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