How to format your references using the Plant Science citation style

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

[1]

A. Abbott, How to make it in Moscow, Nature. 448 (2007) 983.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

M.K. Badman, J.S. Flier, The gut and energy balance: visceral allies in the obesity wars, Science. 307 (2005) 1909–1914.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

N.L. Bernasconi, E. Traggiai, A. Lanzavecchia, Maintenance of serological memory by polyclonal activation of human memory B cells, Science. 298 (2002) 2199–2202.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

M. Diaz-Herraiz, V. Jurado, S. Cuezva, L. Laiz, P. Pallecchi, P. Tiano, S. Sanchez-Moral, C. Saiz-Jimenez, Deterioration of an Etruscan tomb by bacteria from the order Rhizobiales, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 3610.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

N.B. Robbins, Creating More Effective Graphs, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2004.

An edited book

[1]

M.W. Berry, A. Mohamed, B.W. Yap, eds., Soft Computing in Data Science: First International Conference, SCDS 2015, Putrajaya, Malaysia, September 2-3, 2015, Proceedings, Springer, Singapore, 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

J. Quay, J. Seaman, Moving Past the Confusion, in: J. Quay, J. Seaman (Eds.), John Dewey and Education Outdoors: Making Sense of the ‘Educational Situation’ through More than a Century of Progressive Reforms, SensePublishers, Rotterdam, 2013: pp. 61–82.

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 Science.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Beliefs About Innate Talent May Dissuade Students From STEM, IFLScience. (2015). https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/beliefs-about-innate-talent-may-dissuade-students-stem/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Afloat Prepositioning: Not All Equipment Meets the Army’s Readiness Goal, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1997.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

W.E. Koenig, Leadership for the whole in the mythic field of C. G. Jung’s unconscious processes, Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2010.

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

[1]

M.D. Shear, A. Smale, Foreign Leaders Lament U.S. Withdrawal, but Say It Won’t Stop Climate Effort, New York Times. (2017) A9.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Plant Science
Abbreviation	Plant Sci.
ISSN (print)	0168-9452
Scope	Agronomy and Crop Science Plant Science Genetics General Medicine

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