Vancouver Referencing for Agriculture Papers: A Practical Guide

This agriculture journal uses Vancouver style: references are numbered in the order they first appear in the text, up to six authors are listed in full, and seven or more become the first six followed by et al. Include the DOI wherever the source has one.

Reference formatting is the part of an agriculture journal manuscript most often done at midnight before submission, and one of the easiest reasons to be sent back before review. It is also entirely mechanical, which means it can be got right every time.

Numbered, not alphabetical

This catches authors moving to an agriculture journal from another style. In Vancouver, reference 1 is the first source you cite anywhere in the text — not the first alphabetically. Cite it again on page nine and it is still reference 1.

“Split application of nitrogen has been widely recommended [1–3], though the optimum number of splits under irrigated conditions remains disputed [4].”

A reference list sorted alphabetically is the giveaway that the manager was set to the wrong style. It looks tidy and it is wrong, and an editor spots it in two seconds.

The author rule

Number of authors	What to list
1 to 6	All of them
7 or more	The first six, then et al.

Surname first, then initials without full stops: Kumar A, Sharma RK, Patel M. Not A. Kumar, and not Kumar, A. Small differences, and exactly the sort of thing a copy-editor sends back.

The source types you will actually use

Journal article

Al-Habian A, Harikumar PE, Stocker CJ, Langlands K, Selway JL. Histochemical evaluation of mouse skin histology. J Histotechnol. 2014 Dec;37(4):115-124.

Authors, title in sentence case, abbreviated journal name, year, month where given, volume, issue in brackets, page range.

Journal article with a DOI

Aho M, Irshad B, Ackerman SJ, Lewis M, Leddy R, Pope T, et al. Correlation of sonographic features with tumor grade. J Clin Ultrasound. 2013 Jan;41(1):10-7. DOI: 10.1002/jcu.21990

Seven authors, so six then et al., with the DOI at the end. Our guide on what a DOI is explains why that last element outlives every other part of the reference.

Book and book chapter

Buckingham L. Molecular diagnostics: fundamentals, methods and clinical applications. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: F.A. Davis; c2012.

Altobelli N. Airway management. In: Kacmarek R, Stoller JK, Heuer AJ, editors. Fundamentals of respiratory care. 10th ed. St. Louis: Saunders Mosby; c2013. p. 732-86.

Report, bulletin or web page

Give the issuing organisation as author, then title, place, publisher, year, and the access date with the URL. Agricultural research leans heavily on institutional bulletins, package-of-practices documents and departmental reports, and these are the references most often given incompletely — an unnamed year or a missing issuing body makes them uncheckable.

The Instructions to Author page gives worked examples for twenty-two source types, including theses, conference posters, dictionaries and streaming video.

Using a reference manager without being betrayed by it

Set the output style to Vancouver before you start, not at the end.
Check every imported record. Managers import from databases, and databases carry errors — wrong page ranges, missing authors, titles in the wrong case.
Test every DOI. Paste each after https://doi.org/ and confirm it opens the paper you meant.
Read the final list by hand once, slowly. Fifteen minutes, and it catches what automation cannot.

What a reference list is actually for

It is easy to treat references as an administrative tax. They do three jobs, and knowing which helps you decide what to cite:

They let a reader check you. Every claim attributed to someone else should be traceable in one click.
They place your work. The list shows which conversation your paper is joining, and reviewers read it for exactly that.
They credit people — including, occasionally, your own reviewers.

That third point leads to a bad habit worth naming: citation padding, where references are added that the paper does not use. Reviewers in a field can tell, because they know which papers actually bear on the problem.

How many references is right?

There is no number, and anyone quoting one is guessing. What matters is coverage: every claim attributed to prior work has a source, recent literature is engaged with rather than merely listed, and nothing is cited that the paper does not use.

“References are outdated” is a common reviewer comment and it rarely means “add newer citations”. It means the paper does not show awareness of what has happened recently. Adding five 2025 references to the introduction without discussing them does not fix it.

A ten-minute reference check before submitting

Is the list numbered in citation order? Look at reference 1 and find it in the text — it should be the first citation.
Does every number in the text appear in the list, and the reverse?
Does every DOI resolve? Paste each after https://doi.org/ and watch it open.
Are author formats consistent? Surname then initials, no full stops, throughout.
Do standards and bulletins carry their year and issuing body?
Is anything cited that the paper does not use? Remove it.

Ten minutes, and it removes an entire category of copy-editing correspondence after acceptance. Build the list as you write rather than in one session at the end — that is where duplicated entries and mismatched numbering come from.

Five mistakes that cost time

Mistake	Why it matters	Fix
Alphabetical list	Wrong style entirely	Set the manager to Vancouver
Citing a review instead of the source	Credit goes to the wrong place	Cite the original where you rely on it
A DOI that does not resolve	The reference cannot be checked	Test every one before submitting
Bulletin cited without year or issuer	Uncheckable	Give both, every time
Reference in the list but not in the text	An automatic flag in copy-editing	Search the manuscript for each number

Self-citation in a double-blind journal

Citing your own earlier work is legitimate and often necessary. Two limits are worth keeping in mind at an agriculture journal that runs double-blind review.

First, “as we reported previously [7]” identifies you immediately. Write “an earlier study [7] reported” instead — same citation, no signature. Second, if a substantial share of the list is your own group and those papers are not doing real work in the argument, a reviewer will notice.

Citing agricultural sources that are not journal papers

A great deal of agricultural work rests on sources that do not look like journal articles, and these are where reference lists most often become uncheckable.

Package of practices — give the issuing university or department, the title, the year and the edition. “As per package of practices” with no citation is not a reference.
Variety release notification — issuing body, notification number, date.
Statistical databases — the agency, the dataset name, the year of the data, the access date, and the URL. The year of the data and the year you accessed it are different things.
Weather data — the station or agency, and the period covered.
Theses — author, title, degree, university, year.

The test for all of them is the same: could a reader find this exact document from what you have written? If not, add whatever is missing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What referencing style does this agriculture journal use?

Vancouver style. References are numbered in the order they first appear in the text, not alphabetically, and the numbers are used in the text in place of author names.

How many authors do I list before using et al.?

Up to six authors are listed in full. With seven or more, list the first six then et al.

Do I need to include the DOI?

Include it wherever the source has one. It is the only part of a reference that keeps working after a publisher redesigns their site.

How do I cite a standard or a bulletin?

Give the issuing organisation as author, the title, place, publisher and year, with the designation and year of the standard. ASTM D3039 and ASTM D3039-17 are not the same document.

Can I use a reference manager?

Yes, and you should — but set it to a Vancouver output style and then check the result by hand. Managers import errors from databases and reproduce them faithfully.

Where do the numbers go in the text?

Where the source is used, numbered by first appearance. A source cited again later keeps its original number.

Related Guides

The publishing model behind the licence:

Created by Erik Johansson • 09 Aug 2026