How to format your references using the Transactions of the ASABE citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Transactions of the ASABE. 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

Mellars, P. (2011). Palaeoanthropology: the earliest modern humans in Europe. Nature, 479(7374), 483–485.

A journal article with 2 authors

Reinhoudt, D. N., Crego-Calama, M. (2002). Synthesis beyond the molecule. Science (New York, N.Y.), 295(5564), 2403–2407.

A journal article with 3 authors

Planutis, K., Planutiene, M., Holcombe, R. F. (2014). A novel signaling pathway regulates colon cancer angiogenesis through Norrin. Scientific Reports, 4, 5630.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Kim, T.-K., Hemberg, M., Gray, J. M., Costa, A. M., Bear, D. M., Wu, J., … Greenberg, M. E. (2010). Widespread transcription at neuronal activity-regulated enhancers. Nature, 465(7295), 182–187.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Korhonen, J., Savolainen, T., Soininen, J. (2013). Deploying IPv6 in 3GPP Networks. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Brooks, A. J., Clasper, J., Midwinter, M., Hodgetts, T. J., Mahoney, P. F. (Eds.). (2011). Ryan’s Ballistic Trauma: A Practical Guide. London: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Chi, J., Hong, C., Zhang, M., Zhang, Z. (2015). Privacy-Enhancing Range Query Processing over Encrypted Cloud Databases. In J. Wang, W. Cellary, D. Wang, H. Wang, S.-C. Chen, T. Li, & Y. Zhang (Eds.), Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2015: 16th International Conference, Miami, FL, USA, November 1-3, 2015, Proceedings, Part II (pp. 63–77). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Transactions of the ASABE.

Blog post

Andrews, R. (2016, May 1). New Satellite Returns First Remarkable Image Of The Arctic. Retrieved October 30, 2018, from

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. (1989). Aging Aircraft: FAA Needs Comprehensive Plan to Coordinate Government and Industry Actions (No. RCED-90-75). 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

Ziegler, R. T. (2017). The Impact of Strategic Planning Involvement on Employee Engagement in a Federal Public Health Agency (Doctoral dissertation). Pepperdine University, Malibu, 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

Pilon, M. (2014, February 9). Wagner and Ice Dancers Rally U.S. to Finals. New York Times, p. SP6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Mellars, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Mellars, 2011; Reinhoudt and Crego-Calama, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Reinhoudt and Crego-Calama, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Kim et al., 2010)

About the journal

Full journal title	Transactions of the ASABE
Abbreviation	Trans. ASABE
ISSN (print)	2151-0032
ISSN (online)	2151-0040
Scope	Agronomy and Crop Science Food Science Forestry Soil Science Biomedical Engineering