How to format your references using the Biodiversity and Conservation citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Biodiversity and Conservation. 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
Ginsparg P (2011) ArXiv at 20. Nature 476:145–147
A journal article with 2 authors
Orme CM, Bogan JS (2009) Cell biology. Sorting out diabetes. Science 324:1155–1156
A journal article with 3 authors
Cai L, Friedman N, Xie XS (2006) Stochastic protein expression in individual cells at the single molecule level. Nature 440:358–362
A journal article with 5 or more authors
Feng Y, Liu H, Wang P, et al (2014) Enhancing the electrocatalytic property of hollow structured platinum nanoparticles for methanol oxidation through a hybrid construction. Sci Rep 4:6204

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Buchenau J (2011) The Last Caudillo. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK
An edited book
Nicogossian AE, Williams RS, Huntoon CL, et al (eds) (2016) Space Physiology and Medicine: From Evidence to Practice, 4th ed. 2016. Springer, New York, NY
A chapter in an edited book
Li G, Hu Y, Yu Y (2014) Popularity Prediction of Tianya BBS Posts Based on User Behavior. In: Batten L, Li G, Niu W, Warren M (eds) Applications and Techniques in Information Security: 5th International Conference, ATIS 2014, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, November 26-28, 2014. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 33–43

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 Biodiversity and Conservation.

Blog post
Fang J (2014) Nasty Virus Makes Crickets Sterile, but Horny. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/nasty-virus-makes-crickets-sterile-horny/. Accessed 30 Oct 2018

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 (1975) Federal Funding Provided to 10 Police Departments for Intelligence Activities. 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
Dinneny PN (2017) End of August. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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
Sisario B (2017) Logic Streams Way To Top of Album Chart. New York Times C3

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Ginsparg 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Orme and Bogan 2009; Ginsparg 2011).

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

  • Two authors: (Orme and Bogan 2009)
  • Three or more authors: (Feng et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleBiodiversity and Conservation
AbbreviationBiodivers. Conserv.
ISSN (print)0960-3115
ISSN (online)1572-9710
ScopeEcology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Ecology
Nature and Landscape Conservation

Other styles