How to format your references using the Soil Biology and Biochemistry citation style

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

Kubin, L., 2006. Materials science. Collective defect behavior under stress. Science (New York, N.Y.) 312, 864–865.

A journal article with 2 authors

An, S.J., Almers, W., 2004. Tracking SNARE complex formation in live endocrine cells. Science (New York, N.Y.) 306, 1042–1046.

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang, Z., Huang, X., Lu, H., 2014. Association between red blood cell transfusion and bronchopulmonary dysplasia in preterm infants. Scientific Reports 4, 4340.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Yang, D., Carpena-Núñez, J., Fonseca, L.F., Biaggi-Labiosa, A., Hunter, G.W., 2014. Shape-controlled synthesis of palladium and copper superlattice nanowires for high-stability hydrogen sensors. Scientific Reports 4, 3773.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Dunnivant, F.M., 2004. Environmental Laboratory Exercises for Instrumental Analysis and Environmental Chemistry. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Devos, A.S., Blickman, J.G. (Eds.), 2008. Radiological Imaging of the Digestive Tract in Infants and Children, Medical Radiology, Diagnostic Imaging. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

D’Abbondanza, J.A., Lass, E., Ai, J., Macdonald, R.L., 2015. Mouse Genetic Background Is Associated with Variation in Secondary Complications After Subarachnoid Hemorrhage, in: Fandino, J., Marbacher, S., Fathi, A.-R., Muroi, C., Keller, E. (Eds.), Neurovascular Events After Subarachnoid Hemorrhage: Towards Experimental and Clinical Standardisation. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 29–33.

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 Soil Biology and Biochemistry.

Blog post

Fang, J., 2015. Why Are Zebras Stripy? [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/zebra-stripes-best-predicted-temperature/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1993. Federal Research: Aging Federal Laboratories Need Repairs and Upgrades (No. RCED-93-203). 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

Hendricks, J., 2017. Playing-With the World: Toy Story’s Aesthetics and Metaphysics of Play (Doctoral dissertation). University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.

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

Protess, B., Kramer, A.E., McINTIRE, M., 2017. Bank in Kushner Meeting Wields Power for Kremlin. New York Times A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kubin, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (An and Almers, 2004; Kubin, 2006).

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

Two authors: (An and Almers, 2004)
Three or more authors: (Yang et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Soil Biology and Biochemistry
Abbreviation	Soil Biol. Biochem.
ISSN (print)	0038-0717
Scope	Soil Science Microbiology