How to format your references using the Agronomy citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Agronomy. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Searls, D.B. The Language of Genes. Nature 2002, 420, 211–217.

A journal article with 2 authors

Richardson, S.H.; Shirey, S.B. Continental Mantle Signature of Bushveld Magmas and Coeval Diamonds. Nature 2008, 453, 910–913.

A journal article with 3 authors

Meng, F.; Li, X.; Duan, Y. Chip-Based Ingroove Microplasma with Orthogonal Signal Collection: New Approach for Carbon-Containing Species Detection through Open Air Reaction for Performance Enhancement. Sci. Rep. 2014, 4, 4803.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Ozbudak, E.M.; Thattai, M.; Lim, H.N.; Shraiman, B.I.; Van Oudenaarden, A. Multistability in the Lactose Utilization Network of Escherichia Coli. Nature 2004, 427, 737–740.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hens, H. Building Physics - Heat, Air and Moisture; Ernst & Sohn Verlag für Architektur und technische Wissenschaften GmbH & Co. KG: Berlin, Germany, 2012; ISBN 9783433601297.

An edited book

Escalera, S. Traffic-Sign Recognition Systems; Baró, X., Pujol, O., Vitrià, J., Radeva, P., Eds.; SpringerBriefs in Computer Science; Springer: London, 2011; ISBN 9781447122449.

A chapter in an edited book

Eke, A.N.; Wilkes, A.L.; Gaiter, J. Organized Religion and the Fight Against HIV/AIDS in the Black Community: The Role of the Black Church. In African Americans and HIV/AIDS: Understanding and Addressing the Epidemic; McCree, D.H., Jones, K., O’Leary, A., Eds.; Springer: New York, NY, 2010; pp. 53–68 ISBN 9780387783208.

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 Agronomy.

Blog post

Fang, J. Human Pathogen Found in Gray Seal Pups (accessed on 30 October 2018).

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 Information Technology: Additional Actions and Oversight Urgently Needed to Reduce Waste and Improve Performance in Acquisitions and Operations; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 2015;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Edwards, C.D. Migration: Lighting to Evoke Human Responses. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach: Long Beach, CA, 2010.

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

Apuzzo, M.; Schmidt, M.S. White House Tries Civility With Mueller. New York Times 2017, A1.

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	Agronomy
Abbreviation	Agronomy (Basel)
ISSN (online)	2073-4395
Scope