All references must include: name of author(s), year of publication, title, place of publication and publisher (for books), journal title, volume and pages (for articles).

The names of all authors of a work should be given in bibliographies.

Where there are more than three authors in the bibliography, abbreviate to et al. in the text (but not in the bibliography).

When an author has written more than one work in the same year, use a, b, etc. to differentiate, e.g. 2000a, 2000b.

Entries by the same author/s should be listed in ascending chronological order.

Use the ampersand (&) between the names of the last two authors in the bibliography but use and in the text.

Note that FAO should be the corporate author of all FAO copyrighted material.

In the case of a corporate author, it is not necessary to repeat the name of the organization as publisher. However, if the corporate author is not well known or defined in the text, the full name may be given after the name of the publication.

Titles of books, journals and periodicals are italicized (do not use inverted commas).

Titles of articles and chapters are not italicized.

Titles of papers presented at meetings and titles of theses are italicized. The type of thesis, e.g. M.Sc., Ph.D., is placed at the end of the reference, in parentheses, without a full stop, e.g. Saxton, R. 2000. Information and rural women. University College, London. (MA thesis)

Titles of mimeographs are italicized, with the abbreviation mimeo placed at the end of the reference in parentheses, e.g. (mimeo)

Personal communications are not cited in a bibliography but appear only in the text, e.g. (J. Wright, personal communication, 2000).

Following are some examples of bibliographic entries:

Haines, S. & Hunter, C. 2000. Exocortis virus of citrus. Citrus Ind., 49(1): 13–17.

The article title is in roman and lower case except for the initial capital letter. The journal title is italicized, abbreviated (unless the title consists of one word only, e.g. Science) and with initial capital letters. Data are ordered as follows: volume number, (issue number in parentheses) followed by a colon and a space, page numbers.

McKenzie, J. & Gilbert, J.R. 2000. Editorial guidelines. In J. Wright & L. Cole, eds. Points of style, pp. 123–146. Washington, DC, World Resources Institute. 200 pp. The city (place of publication) comes before the publisher. As in this example, when the city is the capital, the country is normally omitted. Note that in references United States and United Kingdom may be abbreviated to USA and UK. Note also that 200 pp. = 200 pages, whereas p. = page (singular). The first word of the book title takes an initial capital letter followed by lower-case initial letters (like the article title in the first example).

Gates, B. 1995. Distributing tactical business planning information via the Internet. In Proc. FAO Workshop on Internet Applications and Electronic Information Resources (available at www.fao.org).