How to format your references using the Ecology citation style

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

Downer, J. 2001. A tortured tale of supply and demand. Nature 410:624.

A journal article with 2 authors

Blondin, J. M., and A. Mezzacappa. 2007. Pulsar spins from an instability in the accretion shock of supernovae. Nature 445:58–60.

A journal article with 3 authors

Morris, M., K. Uchida, and T. Do. 2006. A magnetic torsional wave near the Galactic Centre traced by a “double helix” nebula. Nature 440:308–310.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Xiang, T., L.-R. Wang, L. Ma, Z.-Y. Han, R. Wang, C. Cheng, Y. Xia, H. Qin, and C.-S. Zhao. 2014. From commodity polymers to functional polymers. Scientific reports 4:4604.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Botto, F. 2003. Dictionary of e-Business. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Nguyen, N. T., A. Grzech, R. J. Howlett, and L. C. Jain, editors. 2007. Agent and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications: First KES International Symposium, KES-AMSTA 2007, Wroclaw, Poland, May 31– June 1, 2007. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Zalewski, J. 2013. The Post-Process Era in Composition Studies and the Linguistic Turn of the 20th Century. Pages 51–61 in D. Gabryś-Barker, E. Piechurska-Kuciel, and J. Zybert, editors. Investigations in Teaching and Learning Languages: Studies in Honour of Hanna Komorowska. Springer International Publishing, Heidelberg.

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 Ecology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. 2014, June 27. Promising New Cancer Vaccine Developed. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/promising-new-cancer-vaccine-developed/.

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. 1987. The Army’s Risk Assessment of Chemical Munitions Transportation. 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

Kott, T. M. 2012. Measurements of correlated two-dimensional electrons in the lowest Landau level on silicon(111). Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD.

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

St. John Kelly, E. 1994, May 29. PLAYING IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. New York Times:148.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Downer 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Downer 2001, Blondin and Mezzacappa 2007).

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

Two authors: (Blondin and Mezzacappa 2007)
Three or more authors: (Xiang et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Ecology
Abbreviation	Ecology
ISSN (print)	0012-9658
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics