How to format your references using the animal citation style

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

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Breukink E 2009. Cell biology. Lethal traffic jam. Science (New York, N.Y.) 325, 684–685.
A journal article with 2 authors
Chemla DS and Shah J 2001. Many-body and correlation effects in semiconductors. Nature 411, 549–557.
A journal article with 3 authors
Kalka MB, Smith AR and Kalko EKV 2008. Bats limit arthropods and herbivory in a tropical forest. Science (New York, N.Y.) 320, 71.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Ifa DR, Manicke NE, Dill AL and Cooks RG 2008. Latent fingerprint chemical imaging by mass spectrometry. Science (New York, N.Y.) 321, 805.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Coulson J 2014. Sustainable Use of Wood in Construction. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.
An edited book
Bahrami H 2010. Super-Flexibility for Knowledge Enterprises: A Toolkit for Dynamic Adaptation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
A chapter in an edited book
Ludlow P 2014. Recursion, Legibility, Use. In Recursion: Complexity in Cognition (eds. T. Roeper and M. Speas), Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, pp. 89–112. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

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.

Blog post
O`Callaghan J 2017. Mysterious X-37B Space Plane Completes 600 Days In Earth Orbit. IFLScience. Retrieved on 30 October 2018, from https://www.iflscience.com/space/mysterious-x37b-space-plane-completes-600-days-in-earth-orbit/.

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. GSA: Federal Communications Commission Planned Move to the Portals II Building. 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
Jennings S 2015. Hiring, promotions, and identity negotiation of female hiring agents in American corporate retail. Doctoral dissertation Thesis. University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ.

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
(nyt) SK 2002. World Briefing | Europe: Belarus: Journalists Sentenced. New York Times, A6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Breukink, 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Chemla and Shah, 2001; Breukink, 2009).

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

  • Two authors: (Chemla and Shah, 2001)
  • Three or more authors: (Ifa et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal titleanimal
AbbreviationAnimal
ISSN (print)1751-7311
ISSN (online)1751-732X
ScopeAnimal Science and Zoology

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