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

Boland, J. 2014. Materials science: Diamond gets harder. Nature 510: 220–221.

A journal article with 2 authors

Danielson, J. Å. H., and W. B. Frommer. 2013. Plant science. Jack of all trades, master of flowering. Science 339: 659–660.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bishop, N. A., T. Lu, and B. A. Yankner. 2010. Neural mechanisms of ageing and cognitive decline. Nature 464: 529–535.

A journal article with 20 or more authors

Soma, S., S. Shimegi, N. Suematsu, and H. Sato. 2013. Cholinergic modulation of response gain in the rat primary visual cortex. Sci. Rep. 3: 1138.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Furger, C. 2016. Live Cell Assays. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Hoffmann, T., and G. Larsson eds. 2013. Muslims and the New Information and Communication Technologies: Notes from an Emerging and Infinite Field. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Wong, J. C., G. H. T. Lee, Y. Zhang, W. S. Yim, R. P. Fornia, D. Y. Xu, C. E. Lee, J. L. Kok, and S. A. Cheong. 2013. Comparing the Macroeconomic Responses of US and Japan through Time Series Segmentation. In A. Fred, J. L. G. Dietz, K. Liu, and J. Filipe (Eds.) Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management: Third International Joint Conference, IC3K 2011, Paris, France, October 26-29, 2011. Revised Selected Papers. Communications in Computer and Information Science. pp. 79–93, 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. 2014. Where Does The Smell Of Rain Come From? IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/why-does-rain-smell-so-fantastic/ [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. 1973. Difficulties of the Neighborhood Youth Corps In-School Program and Its Management Problems. 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

Byeon, G. 2014. More than words: A comparative study of Liszt’s Liebesträume and the songs from which they were transcribed. 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

Hu, W. 2017. An Eyesore for 17 Years in Harlem. New York Times A17.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Boland 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Danielson & Frommer 2013, Boland 2014).

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

Two authors: (Danielson & Frommer 2013)
Three or more authors: (Soma et al. 2013)

About the journal

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