How to format your references using the American Journal of Plant Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for American Journal of Plant Sciences. 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

Goulson, D. (2014) Ecology: Pesticides Linked to Bird Declines. Nature, 511, 295–296.

A journal article with 2 authors

Lubenov, E.V. and Siapas, A.G. (2009) Hippocampal Theta Oscillations Are Travelling Waves. Nature, 459, 534–539.

A journal article with 3 authors

Sackmann, E.K., Fulton, A.L. and Beebe, D.J. (2014) The Present and Future Role of Microfluidics in Biomedical Research. Nature, 507, 181–189.

A journal article with 99 or more authors

Li, S., Zhang, L., Wang, H., Chen, Z., Hu, J., Xu, K. and Liu, J. (2014) Ta3N5-Pt Nonwoven Cloth with Hierarchical Nanopores as Efficient and Easily Recyclable Macroscale Photocatalysts. Scientific reports, 4, 3978.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Geman, H. (2015) Agricultural Finance. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Kaklamanis, C. and Pruhs, K., Eds. (2014) Approximation and Online Algorithms: 11th International Workshop, WAOA 2013, Sophia Antipolis, France, September 5-6, 2013, Revised Selected Papers. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Limaye, S.S. and Rengel, M. (2013) Atmospheric Circulation and Dynamics. In: Bengtsson, L., Bonnet, R.-M., Grinspoon, D., Koumoutsaris, S., Lebonnois, S. and Titov, D., Eds., Towards Understanding the Climate of Venus: Applications of Terrestrial Models to Our Sister Planet, Springer, New York, NY, 55–70.

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 American Journal of Plant Sciences.

Blog post

Andrew, D. (2016, August 22) Scientists Asked 5,500 Americans To Reveal Their “Relationship Deal Breakers” — Here’s What They Learned. IFLScience, IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/scientists-asked-5500-americans-to-reveal-their-relationship-deal-breakers-heres-what-they-learned/.

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. (1976) GAO Lead Division Plan for Automatic Data Processing. 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

Burns, D. (2017) Measuring the Outcome of At-Risk Students on Biology Standardized Tests When Using Different Instructional Strategies. Doctoral dissertation, Lindenwood University, St. Charles, MO.

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

Eligon, J. and Smith, M. (2017, July 21) Woman Shot by Minneapolis Officer ‘Didn’t Have to Die,’ Police Chief Says. New York Times, A13.

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	American Journal of Plant Sciences
Abbreviation	Am. J. Plant Sci.
ISSN (print)	2158-2742
ISSN (online)	2158-2750
Scope