How to format your references using the Transactions of the ASABE citation style

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

Feldstein, S. B. (2011). Atmospheric science. Subtropical rainfall and the Antarctic ozone hole. Science (New York, N.Y.), 332(6032), 925–926.

A journal article with 2 authors

Lv, X., Weng, J. (2013). Ternary composite of hemin, gold nanoparticles and graphene for highly efficient decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. Scientific Reports, 3, 3285.

A journal article with 3 authors

Nowak, M. A., Komarova, N. L., Niyogi, P. (2001). Evolution of universal grammar. Science (New York, N.Y.), 291(5501), 114–118.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Yuan, W., Zhou, Y., Li, Y., Li, C., Peng, H., Zhang, J., … Shi, G. (2013). The edge- and basal-plane-specific electrochemistry of a single-layer graphene sheet. Scientific Reports, 3, 2248.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Naylor, W., Laverty, D., Mallett, J. (2008). The Royal Marsden Hospital Handbook of Wound Management in Cancer Care. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Science Ltd.

An edited book

Dvorkin, E. N. (2013). Finite Element Analysis of the Collapse and Post-Collapse Behavior of Steel Pipes: Applications to the Oil Industry. (R. G. Toscano, Ed.). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Kato, N. (2012). Role of vitamin B6 in skin health and diseases. In V. R. Preedy (Ed.), Handbook of diet, nutrition and the skin (pp. 58–66). Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers.

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 Transactions of the ASABE.

Blog post

Hale, T. (2017, January 23). You Can Finally See The World’s Finest Uncut Opal. Retrieved October 30, 2018, from

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. (2006). No Child Left Behind Act: States Face Challenges Measuring Academic Growth (No. GAO-06-948T). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Kim, B. (2013). Essays in the Dynamics Bayesian Models in Marketing (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

Cooper, M., Walsh, M. W. (2010, December 23). In Town That Stopped Checks, A Warning on Public Pensions. New York Times, p. A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Feldstein, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Feldstein, 2011; Lv and Weng, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Lv and Weng, 2013)
Three or more authors: (Yuan et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Transactions of the ASABE
Abbreviation	Trans. ASABE
ISSN (print)	2151-0032
ISSN (online)	2151-0040
Scope	Agronomy and Crop Science Food Science Forestry Soil Science Biomedical Engineering