How to format your references using the Biological Conservation citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Biological 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.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
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
Gammon, K., 2013. Drugs: Blood battles. Nature 493, S14-5.
A journal article with 2 authors
Keeling, R.F., Visbeck, M., 2001. Palaeoceanography. Antarctic stratification and glacial CO2. Nature 412, 605–606.
A journal article with 3 authors
Tucker, W.C., Weber, T., Chapman, E.R., 2004. Reconstitution of Ca2+-regulated membrane fusion by synaptotagmin and SNAREs. Science 304, 435–438.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Wu, H.-C., Mryasov, O.N., Abid, M., Radican, K., Shvets, I.V., 2013. Magnetization states of all-oxide spin valves controlled by charge-orbital ordering of coupled ferromagnets. Sci. Rep. 3, 1830.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Rezaee, Z., 2011. Financial Services Firms. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.
An edited book
Guia, M.J. (Ed.), 2015. The Illegal Business of Human Trafficking. Springer International Publishing, Cham.
A chapter in an edited book
Argyros, A.A., Lourakis, M.I.A., 2006. Vision-Based Interpretation of Hand Gestures for Remote Control of a Computer Mouse, in: Huang, T.S., Sebe, N., Lew, M.S., Pavlović, V., Kölsch, M., Galata, A., Kisačanin, B. (Eds.), Computer Vision in Human-Computer Interaction: ECCV 2006 Workshop on HCI, Graz, Austria, May 13, 2006. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 40–51.

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 Biological Conservation.

Blog post
O`Callaghan, J., 2016. How To Watch Rosetta’s Tearful Goodbye At Comet 67P Today [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/space/how-to-watch-rosettas-tearful-goodbye-at-comet-67-tomorrow/ (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, 1995. Higher Education: Restructuring Student Aid Could Reduce Low-Income Student Dropout Rate (No. HEHS-95-48). 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
Tablason, J.M., 2014. Recollecting (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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
Kishkovsky, S., 2011. Choir Festival to Celebrate St. Basil’s 450 Years. New York Times TR2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gammon, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Gammon, 2013; Keeling and Visbeck, 2001).

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

  • Two authors: (Keeling and Visbeck, 2001)
  • Three or more authors: (Wu et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal titleBiological Conservation
AbbreviationBiol. Conserv.
ISSN (print)0006-3207
ScopeEcology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Nature and Landscape Conservation

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