How to format your references using the Precision Agriculture citation style

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

Maxmen, A. (2011). Translational research: The American way. Nature, 478(7368), S16-8.

A journal article with 2 authors

Birren, S. J., & Marder, E. (2013). Neuroscience. Plasticity in the neurotransmitter repertoire. Science (New York, N.Y.), 340(6131), 436–437.

A journal article with 3 authors

Suzuki, G., Shimazu, N., & Tanaka, M. (2012). A yeast prion, Mod5, promotes acquired drug resistance and cell survival under environmental stress. Science (New York, N.Y.), 336(6079), 355–359.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

D’Ambrosio, V., Cardano, F., Karimi, E., Nagali, E., Santamato, E., Marrucci, L., & Sciarrino, F. (2013). Test of mutually unbiased bases for six-dimensional photonic quantum systems. Scientific reports, 3, 2726.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Vassiliou, P.-C. G. (2013). Discrete-time Asset Pricing Models in Applied Stochastic Finance. Hoboken, NJ USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Soomere, T., & Quak, E. (Eds.). (2013). Preventive Methods for Coastal Protection: Towards the Use of Ocean Dynamics for Pollution Control. Heidelberg: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Janusz, D., Kost, M., & Freytag, J.-C. (2012). Privacy Protocol for Linking Distributed Medical Data. In W. Jonker & M. Petković (Eds.), Secure Data Management: 9th VLDB Workshop, SDM 2012, Istanbul, Turkey, August 27, 2012. Proceedings (pp. 45–57). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

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 Precision Agriculture.

Blog post

Luntz, S. (2017, May 17). Go West Young Tree – Climate Change Moves Forests In Unexpected Direction. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/go-west-young-tree-climate-change-moves-forests-in-unexpected-direction/. Accessed 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. (1996). International Aviation: DOT’s Efforts to Increase U.S. Airlines’ Access to International Markets (No. T-RCED-96-32). 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

Fahmy, C. (2012). Intoxicated by music: A content analysis of the prevalence of alcohol, illicit substances, and tobacco in popular music from 2000 to 2011 (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

Feeney, K. (2009, March 22). An Empire’s New Outpost. New York Times, p. NJ9.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Maxmen 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Birren and Marder 2013; Maxmen 2011).

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

Two authors: (Birren and Marder 2013)
Three or more authors: (D’Ambrosio et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Precision Agriculture
Abbreviation	Precis. Agric.
ISSN (print)	1385-2256
ISSN (online)	1573-1618
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences