How to format your references using the Conservation Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Conservation Letters. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Petsko, G. (2010). Save university arts from the bean counters. Nature, 468, 1003.

A journal article with 2 authors

Buffett, B.A. & Wenk, H.R. (2001). Texturing of the Earth’s inner core by Maxwell stresses. Nature, 413, 60–63.

A journal article with 3 authors

Martinón-Torres, M., Rehren, T. & Freestone, I.C. (2006). Mullite and the mystery of Hessian wares. Nature, 444, 437–438.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Duah, E., Adapala, R.K., Al-Azzam, N., Kondeti, V., Gombedza, F., Thodeti, C.K. & Paruchuri, S. (2013). Cysteinyl leukotrienes regulate endothelial cell inflammatory and proliferative signals through CysLT₂ and CysLT₁ receptors. Sci. Rep., 3, 3274.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Sauter, M. (2014). From GSM to LTE-Advanced. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Müller, M. (ed.). (2014). Polyelectrolyte Complexes in the Dispersed and Solid State II: Application Aspects. Advances in Polymer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Liu, H., Silva, E.A. & Wang, Q. (2015). The Foundation for Agent-Based Modelling: Empirical Evidence of Creative Industries’ Interactions with Urban Land Use in Nanjing. In: Creative Industries and Urban Spatial Structure: Agent-based Modelling of the Dynamics in Nanjing, Advances in Asian Human-Environmental Research (eds. Silva, E.A. & Wang, Q.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 53–100.

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 Conservation Letters.

Blog post

Hale, T. (2016). Court Drops Charges Against Cecil The Lion Hunter [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/court-drops-charges-against-cecil-the-lion-hunter/

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. (1996). SSA Initiatives to Identify Coaching ( No. HEHS-96-96R). 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

Rivera, A. (2010). A post analysis of an advanced access appointment model (Doctoral dissertation).

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

Kenigsberg, B. (2017). Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous. New York Times, C10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Petsko 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Buffett & Wenk 2001; Petsko 2010).

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

Two authors: (Buffett & Wenk 2001)
Three or more authors: (Duah et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Conservation Letters
Abbreviation	Conserv. Lett.
ISSN (online)	1755-263X
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Ecology Nature and Landscape Conservation