How to format your references using the Ecological Research citation style

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

Rees M (2014) A Longitude Prize for the twenty-first century. Nature 509:401

A journal article with 2 authors

Jaffe M, Allam S (2015) POLYMER CHEMISTRY. Safer fuels by integrating polymer theory into design. Science 350:32

A journal article with 3 authors

Kerr JT, Kharouba HM, Currie DJ (2007) The macroecological contribution to global change solutions. Science 316:1581–1584

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Földvári-Nagy L, Ari E, Csermely P, et al (2014) Starvation-response may not involve Atg1-dependent autophagy induction in non-unikont parasites. Sci Rep 4:5829

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Perera AH, Buse LJ (2014) Ecology of Wildfire Residuals in Boreal Forests. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Wood LN (2012) Becoming a Mathematician: An international perspective. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Zhang Z, Li T, Yuan F, Yin L (2014) Synthesis of Linear Antenna Array Using Genetic Algorithm to Control Side Lobe Level. In: Wong WE, Zhu T (eds) Computer Engineering and Networking: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Computer Engineering and Network (CENet2013). Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 39–46

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 Research.

Blog post

Carpineti A (2016) Black Holes Alone Can’t Explain Dark Matter. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/black-holes-alone-can-t-explain-dark-matter/. 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

Government Accountability Office (1994) Airlift Requirements: Commercial Freighters Can Help Meet Requirements at Greatly Reduced Costs. 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

Blasdel ES (2010) A phenomenological study of barriers for women in federal law enforcement. Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix

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 M (1993) Hillary Clinton Health Panel Hears the People, Invitation Only. New York Times 17

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Rees 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Rees 2014; Jaffe and Allam 2015).

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

Two authors: (Jaffe and Allam 2015)
Three or more authors: (Földvári-Nagy et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Ecological Research
Abbreviation	Ecol. Res.
ISSN (print)	0912-3814
ISSN (online)	1440-1703
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics