How to format your references using the The Plant Journal citation style

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

Reed, J.C. (2011) Cancer. Priming cancer cells for death. Science, 334, 1075–1076.

A journal article with 2 authors

Edmunds, J.W. and Mahadevan, L.C. (2006) Cell signaling. Protein kinases seek close encounters with active genes. Science, 313, 449–451.

A journal article with 3 authors

Erez, E., Fass, D. and Bibi, E. (2009) How intramembrane proteases bury hydrolytic reactions in the membrane. Nature, 459, 371–378.

A journal article with 10 or more authors

Gelbard-Sagiv, H., Mukamel, R., Harel, M., Malach, R. and Fried, I. (2008) Internally generated reactivation of single neurons in human hippocampus during free recall. Science, 322, 96–101.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Islam, M.R., Chhetri, A.B. and Khan, M.M. (2010) The Greening of Petroleum Operations, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Agrawal, D., Candan, K.S. and Li, W.-S. eds. (2011) New Frontiers in Information and Software as Services: Service and Application Design Challenges in the Cloud, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Wu, T., Liu, J., Tang, X., Gu, M., Gu, Y., Zhou, J. and Qu, W. (2016) Syntactic Categorization and Semantic Interpretation of Chinese Nominal Compounds. In C.-Y. Lin, N. Xue, D. Zhao, X. Huang, and Y. Feng, eds. Natural Language Understanding and Intelligent Applications: 5th CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2016, and 24th International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages, ICCPOL 2016, Kunming, China, December 2–6, 2016, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 51–62.

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 The Plant Journal.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J. (2017) Here’s What Actually Happened At Roswell In 1947. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/heres-what-actually-happened-at-roswell-in-1947/ [Accessed October 30, 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 (1986) Federal Funding Mechanisms in Support of University Research, 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

Kim, C.S. (2017) Electronic Transport of Thin Crystals in Ruthenium Chloride. Doctoral dissertation. Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach.

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

Cooper, M. (2013) Bolshoi’s Plans for New York Remain Unclear. 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 (Reed, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Reed, 2011; Edmunds and Mahadevan, 2006).

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

Two authors: (Edmunds and Mahadevan, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Gelbard-Sagiv et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	The Plant Journal
Abbreviation	Plant J.
ISSN (print)	0960-7412
ISSN (online)	1365-313X
Scope	Plant Science Cell Biology Genetics