How to format your references using the acta ethologica citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for acta ethologica. 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 references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles 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

Chapman T (2003) Easing the strain. Nature 425:869

A journal article with 2 authors

Weber WJ, Ewing RC (2000) Plutonium immobilization and radiation effects. Science 289:2051–2052

A journal article with 3 authors

Bloch I I, Hansch TW, Esslinger T (2000) Measurement of the spatial coherence of a trapped Bose gas at the phase transition. Nature 403:166–170

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Draper-Joyce CJ, Khoshouei M, Thal DM, et al (2018) Structure of the adenosine-bound human adenosine A1 receptor-Gi complex. Nature 558:559–563

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Lalanne C (2014) Mechanical Shock. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Brennan MF (2016) Management of Soft Tissue Sarcoma, 2nd ed. 2016. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Bäck J, Nikinmaa E, Kulmala L, et al (2013) Processes in Living Structures. In: Hari P, Heliövaara K, Kulmala L (eds) Physical and Physiological Forest Ecology. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 43–223

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 acta ethologica.

Blog post

Hale T (2016) Can You Spot The Mistake In This Simple Viral Puzzle? In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/can-you-solve-simple-puzzle/. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (1995) Airport Improvement Program: Update of Allocation of Funds and Passenger Facility Charges, 1992-94. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Egan GC (2015) Understanding the reaction mechanism of aluminum nanocomposite thermites. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park

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

Gustines GG (2017) George Takei’s Life, as a Graphic Novel. 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 (Chapman 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Weber and Ewing 2000; Chapman 2003).

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

Two authors: (Weber and Ewing 2000)
Three or more authors: (Draper-Joyce et al. 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	acta ethologica
Abbreviation	Acta Ethol.
ISSN (print)	0873-9749
ISSN (online)	1437-9546
Scope	Animal Science and Zoology Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics