How to format your references using the The Crop Journal citation style

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

[1]

R. Ranganathan, Cell biology. A matter of life or death, Science. 299 (2003) 1677–1679.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

C.L. Johnson, A.M. Spence, Epigenetic licensing of germline gene expression by maternal RNA in C. elegans, Science. 333 (2011) 1311–1314.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

W.S. Ryu, R.M. Berry, H.C. Berg, Torque-generating units of the flagellar motor of Escherichia coli have a high duty ratio, Nature. 403 (2000) 444–447.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

M. Touboul, T. Kleine, B. Bourdon, H. Palme, R. Wieler, Late formation and prolonged differentiation of the Moon inferred from W isotopes in lunar metals, Nature. 450 (2007) 1206–1209.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

R.J. Lewis Sr., Hazardous Chemicals Desk Reference, Sixth Edition, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2008.

An edited book

[1]

H. Marien, Analog Organic Electronics: Building Blocks for Organic Smart Sensor Systems on Foil, 1st ed., Springer, New York, NY, 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

H. Hashim, Urological Endoscopic Equipment, in: H. Hashim, P. Abrams, R. Dmochowski (Eds.), The Handbook of Office Urological Procedures, Springer, London, 2008: pp. 23–31.

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 The Crop Journal.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Watch Live Webcast Of Thursday’s Partial Solar Eclipse, IFLScience. (2014).

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Aerial Refueling Initiative: Cross-Service Analysis Needed To Determine Best Approach, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1993.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

M.M. Moon, The needs of Korean-American and Korean families of children with disabilities, Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University, 2009.

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

[1]

K. Belson, M. Pilon, Marathon Is Set to Go On, Stirring Debate, New York Times. (2012) B11.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	The Crop Journal
Abbreviation	Crop J.
ISSN (print)	2214-5141
Scope	Agronomy and Crop Science Plant Science