How to format your references using the BMC Ecology citation style

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

1. Yin Q-Z. Planetary science. Predicting the Sun’s oxygen isotope composition. Science. 2004;305:1729–30.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Caughey B, Baron GS. Prions and their partners in crime. Nature. 2006;443:803–10.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Chen I, Christie PJ, Dubnau D. The ins and outs of DNA transfer in bacteria. Science. 2005;310:1456–60.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Linden S, Enkrich C, Wegener M, Zhou J, Koschny T, Soukoulis CM. Magnetic response of metamaterials at 100 terahertz. Science. 2004;306:1351–3.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Berthold HJ, Binnewies M. Chemisches Grundpraktikum. Weinheim, FRG: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA; 2005.

An edited book

1. Rizzi A. Logistica e tecnologia RFID: Creare valore nella filiera alimentare e nel largo consumo. Milano: Springer; 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Wang W, Chen L, Jie J, Zhao Y, Zhang J. A Novel Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Flow Shop Scheduling Problems. In: Huang D-S, Gan Y, Gupta P, Gromiha MM, editors. Advanced Intelligent Computing Theories and Applications. With Aspects of Artificial Intelligence: 7th International Conference, ICIC 2011, Zhengzhou, China, August 11-14, 2011, Revised Selected Papers. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2012. p. 24–31.

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 BMC Ecology.

Blog post

1. Andrew E. Recently-Discovered Wasp Species Named For Harry Potter Creature. IFLScience. 2014. Accessed 30 Oct 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

1. Government Accountability Office. Information Technology: A Statistical Study of Acquisition Time. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1995.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Greene AE. An Inquiry into Workplace Incivility: Perceptions of Working Graduate Students. Doctoral dissertation. Lindenwood University; 2012.

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

1. Shear MD. Trump Abandoning Global Climate Accord. New York Times. 2017;:A1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1, 2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	BMC Ecology
Abbreviation	BMC Ecol.
ISSN (online)	1472-6785
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics General Environmental Science