How to format your references using the Animal Behaviour citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Animal Behaviour. 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

Butler, D. (2000). Europe agrees to boost Internet networks used by researchers. Nature, 405(6784), 261–262.

A journal article with 2 authors

Ron, D., & Ito, K. (2011). Cell biology. A translational pause to localize. Science (New York, N.Y.), 331(6017), 543–544.

A journal article with 3 authors

Olveczky, B. P., Baccus, S. A., & Meister, M. (2003). Segregation of object and background motion in the retina. Nature, 423(6938), 401–408.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Toyama, Y., Peralta, X. G., Wells, A. R., Kiehart, D. P., & Edwards, G. S. (2008). Apoptotic force and tissue dynamics during Drosophila embryogenesis. Science (New York, N.Y.), 321(5896), 1683–1686.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Curioso, A., Bradford, R., & Galbraith, P. (2010). Expert PHP and MySQL®. Wiley Publishing, Inc.

An edited book

Kalayjian, A. (2010). Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Psychological Pathways to Conflict Transformation and Peace Building (R. F. Paloutzian, Ed.). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Henkel, M., & Pleimling, M. (2010). Local Scale-invariance II: z =/ 2. In M. Pleimling (Ed.), Non-Equilibrium Phase Transitions: Volume 2: Ageing and Dynamical Scaling Far from Equilibrium (pp. 291–336). Springer Netherlands.

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 Animal Behaviour.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, September 15). Did ‘Rising Star’ Shine Too Bright? IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/did-rising-star-shine-too-bright/

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. (1981). President’s Third Special Message for FY 1981 (OGC-81-3). U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Luo, S. X. (2009). Theoretical models of olfactory discrimination in Drosophila [Doctoral dissertation]. Columbia University.

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. (2014, December 21). Conversation Between Works and Over Decades. New York Times, CT9.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Butler, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Butler, 2000; Ron & Ito, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Ron & Ito, 2011)
Three authors: (Olveczky et al., 2003)
6 or more authors: (Toyama et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Animal Behaviour
Abbreviation	Anim. Behav.
ISSN (print)	0003-3472
Scope	Animal Science and Zoology Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics