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

Dodt H-U (2015) Microscopy. The superresolved brain. Science 347:474–475

A journal article with 2 authors

Koh LP, Wilcove DS (2007) Cashing in palm oil for conservation. Nature 448:993–994

A journal article with 3 authors

Cowen RK, Paris CB, Srinivasan A (2006) Scaling of connectivity in marine populations. Science 311:522–527

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Morel CM, Touré YT, Dobrokhotov B, Oduola AMJ (2002) The mosquito genome--a breakthrough for public health. Science 298:79

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bauer E (2010) Design for Reliability. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Jakushokas R (2011) Power Distribution Networks with On-Chip Decoupling Capacitors. Springer, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Dutta R, Kamal AE, Rouskas GN (2008) Grooming Mechanisms in SONET/SDH and Next-Generation SONET/SDH. In: Dutta R, Kamal AE, Rouskas GN (eds) Traffic Grooming for Optical Networks: Foundations, Techniques, and Frontiers. Springer US, Boston, MA, pp 39–55

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

Andrew E (2015) In Defence Of Magpies: The Bird World’s Bad Boy Is Simply Misunderstood. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/defence-magpies-bird-world-s-bad-boy-simply-misunderstood/. 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 (1982) Strong Central Management of Office Automation Will Boost Productivity. 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

Williamson JW (2009) Measurements and analysis of extinction in vitiated flame sheets. 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

Hubbard B (2017) Saudi Arabia to Rescind Ban on Female Drivers. New York Times A1

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Dodt 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Koh and Wilcove 2007; Dodt 2015).

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

Two authors: (Koh and Wilcove 2007)
Three or more authors: (Morel et al. 2002)

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

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