How to format your references using the Planta citation style

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

Lee JT (2012) Epigenetic regulation by long noncoding RNAs. Science 338:1435–1439

A journal article with 2 authors

Hoffman KA, Singer BS (2008) Magnetic source separation in Earth’s outer core. Science 321:1800

A journal article with 3 authors

Bix M, Kim S, Rao A (2005) Immunology. Opposites attract in differentiating T cells. Science 308:1563–1565

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Krawczyk M, Milkiewicz M, Marschall H-U, et al (2014) Variant adiponutrin confers genetic protection against cholestatic itch. Sci Rep 4:6374

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

De Spiegeleer J, Schoutens W, Van Hulle C (2014) The Handbook of Hybrid Securities. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Mortveit HS (2008) An Introduction to Sequential Dynamical Systems. Springer US, Boston, MA

A chapter in an edited book

Chenciner A (2011) Hopf Bifurcation for Invariant Tori. In: Marchioro C (ed) Dynamical Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 197–207

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 Planta.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Sex Offending May Be In The Genes But Knowing That Won’t Prevent It. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/sex-offending-may-be-genes-knowing-won-t-prevent-it/. 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 (1986) University Funding: Federal Funding Mechanisms in Support of University Research. 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

Curry M (2012) Students’ perceptions of entrepreneurship at a historically black university in central Mississippi. Doctoral dissertation, Mississippi 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

Hodara S (2014) A Marriage of Visual Masters. New York Times WE11

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lee 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Hoffman and Singer 2008; Lee 2012).

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

Two authors: (Hoffman and Singer 2008)
Three or more authors: (Krawczyk et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Planta
Abbreviation	Planta
ISSN (print)	0032-0935
ISSN (online)	1432-2048
Scope	Plant Science Genetics