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

Sargent, W. 2004. Obituary: J. Beverley Oke (1928-2004). Nature 428(6982):483.

A journal article with 2 authors

Liu, Z. and Xiao, T. S. 2015. STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY. Assembling the wheel of death. Science (New York, N.Y.) 350(6259):376–377.

A journal article with 3 authors

Turalska, M., West, B. J., and Grigolini, P. 2013. Role of committed minorities in times of crisis. Scientific reports 3:1371.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Quintana, E., Shackleton, M., Sabel, M. S., Fullen, D. R., Johnson, T. M., and Morrison, S. J. 2008. Efficient tumour formation by single human melanoma cells. Nature 456(7222):593–598.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Stephans, R. A. 2004. System Safety for the 21 st Century. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Muratori, C. and Paganini, G. (eds.). 2016. Early Modern Philosophers and the Renaissance Legacy. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Dong, Q., Yang, X., Han, J., and Li, Y. 2015. The Co-simulation of Airborne Stable Platform Based on Adams/Simulink. In R. Shen and W. Qian (eds.). Proceedings of the 27th Conference of Spacecraft TT&C Technology in China: Wider Space for TT&C Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. p. 49–57.

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, July 8. This Blue Lagoon Might Look Beautiful, But You Definitely Shouldn’t Swim In It. IFLScience. IFLScience [Internet]. Available at Website https://www.iflscience.com/environment/people-swim-beautiful-blue-lagoon-buxton-uk-its-extremely-toxic/.

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. 2012. IT Supply Chain: Additional Efforts Needed by National Security-Related Agencies to Address Risks. 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

Moose, A. M. 2013. The Relationship of Distributed Expertise and Shared Leadership in New Product Development Teams: A Comparative Case Study. 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

Koblin, J. and Maheshwari, S. 2017, May 18. CBS Woos Sponsors With Energetic Pitch By a Surging Colbert. New York Times:B6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sargent, 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Sargent, 2004; Liu and Xiao, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Liu and Xiao, 2015)
Three or more authors: (Quintana et al., 2008)

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