How to format your references using the Acta Oecologica citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Acta Oecologica. 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	Download the output style file
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

Barnes, D.K.A., 2002. Biodiversity: invasions by marine life on plastic debris. Nature 416, 808–809.

A journal article with 2 authors

van Oers, N.S.C., Chen, Z.J., 2005. Cell biology. Kinasing and clipping down the NF-kappa B trail. Science 308, 65–66.

A journal article with 3 authors

Rogers, J.A., Someya, T., Huang, Y., 2010. Materials and mechanics for stretchable electronics. Science 327, 1603–1607.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Prinjha, R., Moore, S.E., Vinson, M., Blake, S., Morrow, R., Christie, G., Michalovich, D., Simmons, D.L., Walsh, F.S., 2000. Inhibitor of neurite outgrowth in humans. Nature 403, 383–384.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Xiong, K., 2014. Resource Optimization and Security for Cloud Services. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, USA.

An edited book

Pelcat, M., 2013. Physical Layer Multi-Core Prototyping: A Dataflow-Based Approach for LTE eNodeB, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering. Springer, London.

A chapter in an edited book

Ter Louw, M., Phung, P.H., Krishnamurti, R., Venkatakrishnan, V.N., 2013. SafeScript: JavaScript Transformation for Policy Enforcement, in: Riis Nielson, H., Gollmann, D. (Eds.), Secure IT Systems: 18th Nordic Conference, NordSec 2013, Ilulissat, Greenland, October 18-21, 2013, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 67–83.

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 Oecologica.

Blog post

Luntz, S., 2017. If Color Affects Taxi Safety, Which Shade Is Safest? [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/brain/if-color-affects-taxi-safety-which-shade-is-safest/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 2007. Business Systems Modernization: DOD Needs to Fully Define Policies and Procedures for Institutionally Managing Investments (No. GAO-07-538). 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

Le, R., 2015. Three-Power Power System State Estimation Using Extended Kalman Filter with CompactRIO Implementation (Doctoral dissertation). Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL.

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

Sutherland, J., 2017. You Don’t Know Jane. New York Times BR11.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Barnes, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Barnes, 2002; van Oers and Chen, 2005).

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

Two authors: (van Oers and Chen, 2005)
Three or more authors: (Prinjha et al., 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Acta Oecologica
Abbreviation	Acta Oecol. (Montrouge)
ISSN (print)	1146-609X
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Nature and Landscape Conservation