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

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

Crabtree, R. H. 2002. Chemistry. A new oxidation state for Pd? Science (New York, N.Y.) 295:288–289.

A journal article with 2 authors

Blander, J. M., and R. Medzhitov. 2004. Regulation of phagosome maturation by signals from toll-like receptors. Science (New York, N.Y.) 304:1014–1018.

A journal article with 3 authors

Li, S., J. Matthews, and A. Sinha. 2008. Atmospheric hydroxyl radical production from electronically excited NO2 and H2O. Science (New York, N.Y.) 319:1657–1660.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Miller, C. N., I. Proekt, J. von Moltke, K. L. Wells, A. R. Rajpurkar, H. Wang, K. Rattay, I. S. Khan, T. C. Metzger, J. L. Pollack, A. C. Fries, W. W. Lwin, E. J. Wigton, A. V. Parent, B. Kyewski, D. J. Erle, K. A. Hogquist, L. M. Steinmetz, R. M. Locksley, and M. S. Anderson. 2018. Thymic tuft cells promote an IL-4-enriched medulla and shape thymocyte development. Nature 559:627–631.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Scott, A. W., and R. Frobenius. 2008. RF Measurements for Cellular Phones and Wireless Data Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Tan, Y., and Y. Shi (eds). 2016. Data Mining and Big Data: First International Conference, DMBD 2016, Bali, Indonesia, June 25-30, 2016. Proceedings. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Cohen, T., and J. (yossi) Gil. 2006. Shakeins: Nonintrusive Aspects for Middleware Frameworks. Pp. 101–146 in A. Rashid and M. Aksit, eds. Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development II. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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 Species Biology.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J. 2016. We’re Going To Find Out What Mars Sounds Like For The First Time In 2021. IFLScience.

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. 1982. Teenage Prostitution and Child Pornography. 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

Tanner-Anderson, S. L. 2014. “The Road Less Traveled”: The Female’s Journey to the State Superintendency. George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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

Schwirtz, M. 2017. Mayor Unveiling Proposal To Close Rikers Jail Complex.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Crabtree 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Blander and Medzhitov 2004; Crabtree 2002).

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

Two authors: (Blander and Medzhitov 2004)
Three or more authors: (Miller et al. 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Plant Species Biology
ISSN (print)	0913-557X
ISSN (online)	1442-1984
Scope