How to format your references using the Biota Neotropica citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Biota Neotropica. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

WILLYARD, C. 2015. Pharmacotherapy: Quest for the quitting pill. Nature 522(7557):S53-5.

A journal article with 2 authors

ZHONG, C.-B. & LILJENQUIST, K. 2006. Washing away your sins: threatened morality and physical cleansing. Science 313(5792):1451–1452.

A journal article with 3 authors

GALDI, S., ARCURI, L. & GAWRONSKI, B. 2008. Automatic mental associations predict future choices of undecided decision-makers. Science 321(5892):1100–1102.

A journal article with 20 or more authors

SCHALCH, T., DUDA, S., SARGENT, D.F. & RICHMOND, T.J. 2005. X-ray structure of a tetranucleosome and its implications for the chromatin fibre. Nature 436(7047):138–141.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

MOREAU, N. 2013. Tools for Signal Compression. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ USA.

An edited book

PITT, K.A. & LUCAS, C.H., eds. 2014. Jellyfish Blooms. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

BIVAND, R.S., PEBESMA, E. & GÓMEZ-RUBIO, V. 2013. Further Methods for Handling Spatial Data. In Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R (E. Pebesma & V. Gómez-Rubio, eds) Springer, New York, NY, p.127–150.

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 Biota Neotropica.

Blog post

HAMILTON, K. 2016. What Is Spice And Why Is The Drug So Dangerous? IFLScience.

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. 2003. Transportation Security Research: Coordination Needed in Selecting and Implementing Infrastructure Vulnerability Assessments.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

MELUZZI, D. 2013. Computational Analysis of DNA Interactions to Investigate the Spatial Organization of Chromatin. Doctoral dissertation. University of California San Diego, La Jolla, 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

YABLONSKY, L. 2006. “Caligula” Gives a Toga Party (But No One’s Really Invited). New York Times 234.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Willyard 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Willyard 2015, Zhong & Liljenquist 2006).

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

Two authors: (Zhong & Liljenquist 2006)
Three or more authors: (Schalch et al. 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Biota Neotropica
ISSN (print)	1676-0603
ISSN (online)	1676-0611
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics