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

Müller, M.M., 2001. Object processing in the infant brain. Science 292, 163.

A journal article with 2 authors

Tessier, P.M., Lindquist, S., 2007. Prion recognition elements govern nucleation, strain specificity and species barriers. Nature 447, 556–561.

A journal article with 3 authors

Gilestro, G.F., Tononi, G., Cirelli, C., 2009. Widespread changes in synaptic markers as a function of sleep and wakefulness in Drosophila. Science 324, 109–112.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Yuan, G.-C., Liu, Y.-J., Dion, M.F., Slack, M.D., Wu, L.F., Altschuler, S.J., Rando, O.J., 2005. Genome-scale identification of nucleosome positions in S. cerevisiae. Science 309, 626–630.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Serval, J.-F., Tranié, J.-P., 2014. The Monetary System. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Fisher, M., Torre, L. van der, Dastani, M., Governatori, G. (Eds.), 2012. Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems: 13th International Workshop, CLIMA XIII, Montpellier, France, August 27-28, 2012. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Anastassiou, G.A., Argyros, I.K., 2016. Newton-Like Procedures and Their Applications in Multivariate Fractional Calculus, in: Argyros, I.K. (Ed.), Intelligent Numerical Methods II: Applications to Multivariate Fractional Calculus, Studies in Computational Intelligence. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 51–62.

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

Andrews, R., 2016. 6,000-Year-Old Amulet Represents A Tech That Helped Take Humanity Into Space [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/technology/6000yearold-amulet-represents-tech-helped-humanity-space/ (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, 1998. China: U.S. and European Union Arms Sales Since the 1989 Embargoes (No. T-NSIAD-98-171). 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

Coggin, L.L., 2014. Creating discourses of possibility: Storying between the real and the imagined to negotiate rural lives in two elementary classrooms (Doctoral dissertation). Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

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

Hodara, S., 2017. Progress and Preservation, in a Small-Town Package. New York Times RE8.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Müller, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Müller, 2001; Tessier and Lindquist, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Tessier and Lindquist, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Yuan et al., 2005)

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