How to format your references using the Ecological Complexity citation style

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

Brown, G.C., 2003. Cell biology. NO says yes to mitochondria. Science 299, 838–839.

A journal article with 2 authors

Yoon, S.-J., Lee, Y.-W., 2002. An aligned stream of low-metallicity clusters in the halo of the Milky Way. Science 297, 578–581.

A journal article with 3 authors

Aitken, C.M., Jones, D.M., Larter, S.R., 2004. Anaerobic hydrocarbon biodegradation in deep subsurface oil reservoirs. Nature 431, 291–294.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Liu, Q., Xin, W., He, P., Turner, D., Yin, J., Gan, Y., Shi, F.-D., Wu, J., 2014. Interleukin-17 inhibits adult hippocampal neurogenesis. Sci. Rep. 4, 7554.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Courant, R., McShane, E.J., 1988. Differential and Integral Calculus. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Kazar, B.M., 2012. Spatial AutoRegression (SAR) Model: Parameter Estimation Techniques, SpringerBriefs in Computer Science. Springer US, Boston, MA.

A chapter in an edited book

Terwijn, S.A., 2010. Intuitionistic Logic and Computability Theory, in: Dawar, A., Queiroz, R. de (Eds.), Logic, Language, Information and Computation: 17th International Workshop, WoLLIC 2010, Brasilia, Brazil, July 6-9, 2010. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 55–57.

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 Ecological Complexity.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2015. Meet The World’s Most-Traded, Least-Known Mammal [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/meet-world-s-most-traded-least-known-mammal/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1988. Guaranteed Student Loans: Lenders’ Interest Billings Often Result in Overpayments (No. HRD-88-72). 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

Subramanian, K., 2003. Mechanisms and Effect of Microstructure on High Temperature Deformation of Gamma-TiAl Based Alloys (Doctoral dissertation). Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.

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

Saslow, L., 2006. Suozzi Offers Plan to Shore Up Aviation Museum. New York Times 14LI2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Brown, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Brown, 2003; Yoon and Lee, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Yoon and Lee, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Liu et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Ecological Complexity
Abbreviation	Ecol. Complex.
ISSN (print)	1476-945X
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Ecological Modelling