How to format your references using the Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. 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

Kiessling, W. 2005. Long-term relationships between ecological stability and biodiversity in Phanerozoic reefs. Nature 433(7024):410–413.

A journal article with 2 authors

Pallen, M. J. and Wren, B. W. 2007. Bacterial pathogenomics. Nature 449(7164):835–842.

A journal article with 3 authors

Doncaster, C. P., Pound, G. E., and Cox, S. J. 2000. The ecological cost of sex. Nature 404(6775):281–285.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Stokkan, K. A., Yamazaki, S., Tei, H., Sakaki, Y., and Menaker, M. 2001. Entrainment of the circadian clock in the liver by feeding. Science (New York, N.Y.) 291(5503):490–493.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Jones, D. W. 2014. Economic Theory and the Ancient Mediterranean. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Craig, R. G. and Kamer, A. R. (eds.). 2016. A Clinician’s Guide to Systemic Effects of Periodontal Diseases. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Costabile, L. T., Vendrametto, O., de Oliveira Neto, G. C., Neto, M. M., and Shibuya, M. K. 2015. Social Network Analysis on Grain Production in the Brazilian Scenario. In S. Umeda, M. Nakano, H. Mizuyama, N. Hibino, D. Kiritsis, and G. von Cieminski (eds.). Advances in Production Management Systems: Innovative Production Management Towards Sustainable Growth: IFIP WG 5.7 International Conference, APMS 2015, Tokyo, Japan, September 7-9, 2015, Proceedings, Part I Springer International Publishing, Cham. p. 36–44.

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 Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems.

Blog post

Andrew, E. 2015, June 24. The Horrifying Reason That Your Eyes Go Red In The Pool. IFLScience. IFLScience [Internet]. Available at Website https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/cdc-reveals-your-eyes-dont-itch-after-swimming-because-chlorine-its-pee-pol/.

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. 1970. St. Louis Postal Data Center’s Administration of Accounts Payable. 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

Gan, K. 2011. A Parity-Violating Spin Rotation Measurement of Transversely Polarized Cold Neutrons Through a Liquid Helium Target. Doctoral dissertation, 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

Kishkovsky, S. 2007, February 11. The Bolshoi Tries Partnering With a Friend From America. New York Times:AR10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kiessling, 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Kiessling, 2005; Pallen and Wren, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Pallen and Wren, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Stokkan et al., 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems
Abbreviation	Renew. Agric. Food Syst.
ISSN (print)	1742-1705
ISSN (online)	1742-1713
Scope	Agronomy and Crop Science Food Science