How to format your references using the Ecological Informatics citation style

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

Reich, P.B., 2009. Elevated CO2 reduces losses of plant diversity caused by nitrogen deposition. Science 326, 1399–1402.

A journal article with 2 authors

Wenseleers, T., Ratnieks, F.L.W., 2006. Enforced altruism in insect societies. Nature 444, 50.

A journal article with 3 authors

Luo, Y., White, L., Hui, D., 2004. Comment on “Impacts of fine root turnover on forest NPP and soil C sequestration potential.” Science 304, 1745; author reply 1745.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Guo, M., Chong, Y.E., Shapiro, R., Beebe, K., Yang, X.-L., Schimmel, P., 2009. Paradox of mistranslation of serine for alanine caused by AlaRS recognition dilemma. Nature 462, 808–812.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ibe, O.C., 2011. Fundamentals of Stochastic Networks. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Bolc, L., Tadeusiewicz, R., Chmielewski, L.J., Wojciechowski, K. (Eds.), 2010. Computer Vision and Graphics: International Conference, ICCVG 2010, Warsaw, Poland, September 20-22, 2010, Proceedings, Part I, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Cooper, C.R., Satcher, R.A., Gurski, L.A., van Golen, K.L., 2009. Mechanism of Metastasis to Bone: The Role of Bone Marrow Endothelium, in: Bronner, F., Farach-Carson, M.C. (Eds.), Bone and Cancer. Springer, London, pp. 57–71.

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 Informatics.

Blog post

Andrew, D., 2015. Can You Trust Your Ears? [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/audio-illusions-can-you-trust-your-ears/ (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, 1998. National Weather Service: Budget Events and Continuing Risks of Systems Modernization (No. T-AIMD-98-97). 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

Atchley, D., 2009. Interventions, perceptions of accommodations, and motivating factors impacting the achievement and successful mainstreaming transition of English language learners (Doctoral dissertation). Lindenwood University, St. Charles, MO.

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

Wines, M., Williams, T., 2014. Huge Leak of Coal Ash Slows at North Carolina Power Plant. New York Times A11.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Reich, 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Reich, 2009; Wenseleers and Ratnieks, 2006).

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

Two authors: (Wenseleers and Ratnieks, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Guo et al., 2009)

About the journal

Full journal title	Ecological Informatics
Abbreviation	Ecol. Inform.
ISSN (print)	1574-9541
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Computational Theory and Mathematics Computer Science Applications Ecological Modelling Ecology Applied Mathematics Modelling and Simulation