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

LEWIS, R. 2007. Chemistry in context. Nature 446(7134):464–465.

A journal article with 2 authors

SALLAN, L. & GALIMBERTI, A.K. 2015. Body-size reduction in vertebrates following the end-Devonian mass extinction. Science 350(6262):812–815.

A journal article with 3 authors

BAIRD, P., DOWNIE, J. & THOMPSON, J. 2002. Medicine. Clinical trials and industry. Science 297(5590):2211.

A journal article with 20 or more authors

NOCTOR, S.C., FLINT, A.C., WEISSMAN, T.A., DAMMERMAN, R.S. & KRIEGSTEIN, A.R. 2001. Neurons derived from radial glial cells establish radial units in neocortex. Nature 409(6821):714–720.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

AMERICAN COUNSELING ASSOCIATION. 2015. The ACA Encyclopedia of Counseling. American Counseling Association, Alexandria, VA, USA.

An edited book

VOLANTE, L., ed. 2012. School Leadership in the Context of Standards-Based Reform: International Perspectives. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

GUPTA, M. 2010. Spoken Web: A Parallel Web for the Masses: Industry Keynote. In Distributed Computing and Networking: 11th International Conference, ICDCN 2010, Kolkata, India, January 3-6, 2010. Proceedings (K. Kant, S. V. Pemmaraju, K. M. Sivalingam, & J. Wu, eds) Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, p.4–4.

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

ANDREWS, R. 2016. Yellowstone Microbe Piggybacks On Others To Steal Their Nutrients. 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. 2002. Options to Enhance the Long-term Viability of the Essential Air Service Program.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

MADDIRALA, R.R. 2010. Secure file transfers using mobile device. 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

VECSEY, G. 2010. Jordan’s No. 23 Just Isn’t the Retiring Type. New York Times SP6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lewis 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Lewis 2007, Sallan & Galimberti 2015).

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

Two authors: (Sallan & Galimberti 2015)
Three or more authors: (Noctor et al. 2001)

About the journal

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

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