How to format your references using the Plant Systematics and Evolution citation style

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

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Lutkenhaus J (2008) Biochemistry. Tinkering with acellular division. Science 320:755–756
A journal article with 2 authors
Webb J, Domanski M (2009) Paleontology. Fire and stone. Science 325:820–821
A journal article with 3 authors
Dunningham J, Rau A, Burnett K (2005) From pedigree cats to fluffy-bunnies. Science 307:872–875
A journal article with 5 or more authors
Gagnon E, Ranitovic P, Tong X-M, et al (2007) Soft X-ray-driven femtosecond molecular dynamics. Science 317:1374–1378

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Burghardt G, Walls B (2011) Managed Futures for Institutional Investors. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ
An edited book
Saad A, Dahal K, Sarfraz M, Roy R (eds) (2007) Soft Computing in Industrial Applications: Recent Trends. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
A chapter in an edited book
Ésik Z, Kuich W (2014) On Power Series over a Graded Monoid. In: Calude CS, Freivalds R, Kazuo I (eds) Computing with New Resources: Essays Dedicated to Jozef Gruska on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 49–55

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 Systematics and Evolution.

Blog post
Fang J (2014) Water found on extrasolar ‘hot Jupiter.’ 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) Intercity Passenger Rail: The Financial Viability of Amtrak Continues to Be Threatened. 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
Nam Y-H (2008) On Throughput-Reliability-Delay Tradeoffs in Wireless Networks. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State 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
Vecsey G (2010) A Goal Apart in ’08, Face to Face Now. New York Times B14

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lutkenhaus 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Lutkenhaus 2008; Webb and Domanski 2009).

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

  • Two authors: (Webb and Domanski 2009)
  • Three or more authors: (Gagnon et al. 2007)

About the journal

Full journal titlePlant Systematics and Evolution
AbbreviationOsterr. Bot. Z.
ISSN (print)0378-2697
ISSN (online)2199-6881
ScopeEcology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Plant Science

Other styles