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 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

Stairs, I.H. (2004). Pulsars in binary systems: probing binary stellar evolution and general relativity. Science, 304, 547–552.

A journal article with 2 authors

Raviv, U. & Klein, J. (2002). Fluidity of bound hydration layers. Science, 297, 1540–1543.

A journal article with 3 authors

Duplessy, J.C., Roche, D.M. & Kageyama, M. (2007). The deep ocean during the last interglacial period. Science, 316, 89–91.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Venter, H., Shilling, R.A., Velamakanni, S., Balakrishnan, L. & Van Veen, H.W. (2003). An ABC transporter with a secondary-active multidrug translocator domain. Nature, 426, 866–870.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Mohos, F.Á. (2017). Confectionery and Chocolate Engineering. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Hayat, M.A. (ed.). (2012). Tumors of the Central Nervous System, Volume 6: Spinal Tumors (Part 1). Tumors of the Central Nervous System. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Chen, Q. (2005). China Putian Promote Commercial TD-SCDMA Services. In: Embedded Software and Systems: First International Conference, ICESS 2004, Hangzhou, China, December 9-10, 2004, Revised Selected Papers, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (eds. Wu, Z., Chen, C., Guo, M. & Bu, J.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 25–29.

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

Luntz, S. (2014). “Dark Magma” Proposed To Explain Volcanic Mystery [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/physics/dark-magma-proposed-explain-volcanic-mystery/

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. (2008). Digital Television Transition: Broadcasters’ Transition Status, Low-Power Station Issues, and Information on Consumer Awareness of the DTV Transition ( No. GAO-08-881T). 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

Merkurjev, D. (2015). Understanding Enhancer Role in Transcriptional Response (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

Kelly, C. (2013). ‘Cowboy Stuntman’ Was an Olympic Medalist, Too. New York Times, A21B.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Stairs 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Raviv & Klein 2002; Stairs 2004).

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

Two authors: (Raviv & Klein 2002)
Three or more authors: (Venter et al. 2003)

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