How to format your references using the Biotropica citation style

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

Kealey, T. 2000. More is less. Economists and governments lag decades behind Derek Price’s thinking. Nature 405: 279.

A journal article with 2 authors

Narbonne, P., and R. Roy. 2009. Caenorhabditis elegans dauers need LKB1/AMPK to ration lipid reserves and ensure long-term survival. Nature 457: 210–214.

A journal article with 3 authors

Gao, G., X. Guo, and S. P. Goff. 2002. Inhibition of retroviral RNA production by ZAP, a CCCH-type zinc finger protein. Science 297: 1703–1706.

A journal article with 20 or more authors

Takato, N., S. J. Bus, H. Terada, T.-S. Pyo, and N. Kobayashi. 2004. Detection of a deep 3-microm absorption feature in the spectrum of Amalthea (JV). Science 306: 2224–2227.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hoschette, J. A. 2010. The Engineer’s Career Guide. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Elvin, N., and A. Erturk eds. 2013. Advances in Energy Harvesting Methods. Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

Hwang, Y., H. Chae, and M. Jeon. 2010. A Variant of Naor-Pinkas Oblivious Transfer for More Efficient Authentication. In G. S. Tomar, R.-S. Chang, O. Gervasi, T.-H. Kim, and S. K. Bandyopadhyay (Eds.) Advanced Computer Science and Information Technology: Second International Conference, AST 2010, Miyazaki, Japan, June 23-25, 2010. Proceedings. Communications in Computer and Information Science. pp. 32–38, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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 Biotropica.

Blog post

Andrew, E. 2015. Why Banning The Mammoth Ivory Trade Would Be A Huge Mistake. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/why-banning-mammoth-ivory-trade-would-be-huge-mistake/ [Accessed October 30, 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. 1986. Social Security: Quality of Services Generally Rated High by Clients Sampled. 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

Brown, C. E. 2013. Sources for the reevaluation of George Frederick Root’s career: The autobiography & a secular cantata. Doctoral dissertation. University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD.

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

Zernike, K. 2015. ‘A Crazy Shake.’ Then Metal Tearing, and Chaos. New York Times A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kealey 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Kealey 2000, Narbonne & Roy 2009).

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

Two authors: (Narbonne & Roy 2009)
Three or more authors: (Takato et al. 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	Biotropica
Abbreviation	Biotropica
ISSN (print)	0006-3606
ISSN (online)	1744-7429
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics