How to format your references using the Plant Gene citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Plant Gene. 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

Kaufman, F., 2012. Futures market: Wall Street’s thirst for water. Nature 490, 469–471.

A journal article with 2 authors

Turelli, P., Trono, D., 2005. Editing at the crossroad of innate and adaptive immunity. Science 307, 1061–1065.

A journal article with 3 authors

Piovia-Scott, J., Spiller, D.A., Schoener, T.W., 2011. Effects of experimental seaweed deposition on lizard and ant predation in an island food web. Science 331, 461–463.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Blumberg, G., Littlewood, P., Gozar, A., Dennis, B.S., Motoyama, N., Eisaki, H., Uchida, S., 2002. Sliding density wave in Sr14Cu24O41 ladder compounds. Science 297, 584–587.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Loriaux, D.L., 2016. A Biographical History of Endocrinology. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

César, E., Alexander, M., Streit, A., Träff, J.L., Cérin, C., Knüpfer, A., Kranzlmüller, D., Jha, S. (Eds.), 2009. Euro-Par 2008 Workshops - Parallel Processing: VHPC 2008, UNICORE 2008, HPPC 2008, SGS 2008, PROPER 2008, ROIA 2008, and DPA 2008, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, August 25-26, 2008, Revised Selected Papers, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Luo, J., Liu, T., Liu, Y., 2012. FT-NIR and Confocal Microscope Raman Spectroscopic Studies of Sesame Oil Adulteration, in: Li, D., Chen, Y. (Eds.), Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture V: 5th IFIP TC 5/SIG 5.1 Conference, CCTA 2011, Beijing, China, October 29-31, 2011, Proceedings, Part II, IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 24–31.

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 Plant Gene.

Blog post

Evans, K., 2016. B12 Deficiency In Mothers Raises Risk Of Type 2 Diabetes In Children [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/b12-deficiency-in-mothers-raises-risk-type-2-diabetes-in-children/ (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, 2004. Information Technology: Major Federal Networks That Support Homeland Security Functions (No. GAO-04-375). 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

Hernandez, K., 2015. Life skills education for at-risk youth at Soledad Enrichment Action Charter High School: A grant proposal (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Hollander, S., 2000. Missed Opportunities Are the Liberty’s Downfall. New York Times D5.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kaufman, 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Kaufman, 2012; Turelli and Trono, 2005).

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

Two authors: (Turelli and Trono, 2005)
Three or more authors: (Blumberg et al., 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Plant Gene
Abbreviation	Plant Gene
ISSN (print)	2352-4073
Scope