How to format your references using the Behavioral Ecology citation style

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

Goodwin I. 2001. Bush appoints venture capitalist as technology adviser. Nature. 410(6829):617.

A journal article with 2 authors

Barbi E, Vaupel JW. 2005. Comment on “Inflammatory exposure and historical changes in human life-spans.” Science. 308(5729):1743; author reply 1743.

A journal article with 3 authors

Worobey M, Han G-Z, Rambaut A. 2014. A synchronized global sweep of the internal genes of modern avian influenza virus. Nature. 508(7495):254–257.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Martin A, Bardwell PD, Woo CJ, Fan M, Shulman MJ, Scharff MD. 2002. Activation-induced cytidine deaminase turns on somatic hypermutation in hybridomas. Nature. 415(6873):802–806.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Larsen E, Aarts RM. 2005. Audio Bandwidth Extension. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Priol T, Vanneschi M, editors. 2007. Towards Next Generation Grids: Proceedings of the CoreGRID Symposium 2007. Boston, MA: Springer US.

A chapter in an edited book

Amadori D, Gosse L. 2015. Lyapunov FunctionalFunctional for Inertial Approximations. In: Gosse L, editor. Error Estimates for Well-Balanced Schemes on Simple Balance Laws: One-Dimensional Position-Dependent Models. Cham: Springer International Publishing. (SpringerBriefs in Mathematics). p. 45–79.

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 Behavioral Ecology.

Blog post

Andrew E. 2015 Jul 7. Half of Europe’s Electricity Could be Renewable by 2030. IFLScience. [accessed 2018 Oct 30]. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/half-europes-electricity-could-be-renewable-2030/.

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. 1968. Need To Improve System for Managing Capitalized Equipment in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office Report No.: B-114868.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Krishna V. 2008. Exploring organizational commitment from an organizational perspective: Organizational learning as a determinant of affective commitment in Indian software firms [Doctoral dissertation]. [Washington, DC]: George Washington 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

Walsh MW. 2016 Feb 26. Treasury Official Urges Relief for Puerto Rico, but Lawmakers Fear Fallout. New York Times.:B3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Goodwin 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Goodwin 2001; Barbi and Vaupel 2005).

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

Two authors: (Barbi and Vaupel 2005)
Three or more authors: (Martin et al. 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Behavioral Ecology
Abbreviation	Behav. Ecol.
ISSN (print)	1045-2249
ISSN (online)	1465-7279
Scope	Animal Science and Zoology Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics