How to format your references using the Planta citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Planta. 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	Download the output style file
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

Smaglik P (2005) A question of age. Nature 434:1159

A journal article with 2 authors

Heldin CH, Ericsson J (2001) Signal transduction. RIPping tyrosine kinase receptors apart. Science 294:2111–2113

A journal article with 3 authors

Gonçalves B, Balcan D, Vespignani A (2013) Human mobility and the worldwide impact of intentional localized highly pathogenic virus release. Sci Rep 3:810

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Moore CB, John M, James IR, et al (2002) Evidence of HIV-1 adaptation to HLA-restricted immune responses at a population level. Science 296:1439–1443

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Tebbani S, Lopes F, Filali R, et al (2014) CO 2 Biofixation by Microalgae. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Leitão VMA, Alves CJS, Armando Duarte C (eds) (2007) Advances in Meshfree Techniques. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Soler L, Marescaux J (2016) Virtual Surgical Simulation: The First Steps in a New Training. In: Fauquet-Alekhine P, Pehuet N (eds) Simulation Training: Fundamentals and Applications: Improving Professional Practice Through Simulation Training. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 95–117

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 Planta.

Blog post

Davis J (2017) Evidence Of Some Of South America’s Earliest Modern Humans Found Under Pyramid In Peru. In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (2014) Spectrum Management: FCC’s Use and Enforcement of Buildout Requirements. 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

Meng W (2014) Synthesis and design of microwave wideband filters and components. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park

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

Greenhouse L (2006) Supreme Court Weighs The Meaning of ‘Obvious.’ New York Times C3

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smaglik 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Heldin and Ericsson 2001; Smaglik 2005).

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

Two authors: (Heldin and Ericsson 2001)
Three or more authors: (Moore et al. 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Planta
Abbreviation	Planta
ISSN (print)	0032-0935
ISSN (online)	1432-2048
Scope	Plant Science Genetics