How to format your references using the Ecosystems citation style

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

Fortini ME. 2007. Medicine. Anticipating trouble from gene transcription. Science 315:1800–1.

A journal article with 2 authors

Milinski M, Rockenbach B. 2007. Economics. Spying on others evolves. Science 317:464–5.

A journal article with 3 authors

Yao L, Xi L, Jiang H. 2014. Photoacoustic computed microscopy. Sci Rep 4:4960.

A journal article with 99 or more authors

Darwin KH, Ehrt S, Gutierrez-Ramos J-C, Weich N, Nathan CF. 2003. The proteasome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis is required for resistance to nitric oxide. Science 302:1963–6.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Rémond Y, Ahzi S, Baniassadi M, Garmestani H. 2016. Applied RVE Reconstruction and Homogenization of Heterogeneous Materials. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Kern TA, editor. 2009. Engineering Haptic Devices: A Beginner’s Guide for Engineers. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer

A chapter in an edited book

ter Haar Romeny BM. 2014. A Geometric Model for the Functional Circuits of the Visual Front-End. In: Grandinetti L, Lippert T, Petkov N, editors. Brain-Inspired Computing: International Workshop, BrainComp 2013, Cetraro, Italy, July 8-11, 2013, Revised Selected Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp 35–50.

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 Ecosystems.

Blog post

Luntz S. 2016. Vaccines Work Better When Injected In The Morning, Claims Study. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/vaccinate-mornings/. Last accessed 30/10/2018

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. 1978. Federal Capitation Support and Its Role in the Operation of Medical Schools. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Gates DA. 2017. Best Practices and Strategies for Financial Literacy in Faith-Based Organizations.

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 S. 1993. CHILDREN’S BOOKS. New York Times:717.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Fortini 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Fortini 2007; Milinski and Rockenbach 2007).

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

Two authors: (Milinski and Rockenbach 2007)
Three or more authors: (Darwin and others 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Ecosystems
Abbreviation	Ecosystems
ISSN (print)	1432-9840
ISSN (online)	1435-0629
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Ecology Environmental Chemistry