How to format your references using the Herpetologica citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Herpetologica. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Smaglik, P. 2004. Cash incentives. Nature 427:567.

A journal article with 2 authors

Mullen, G.M., and C.B. Mullins. 2014. Chemistry. Water’s place in Au catalysis. Science 345:1564–1565.

A journal article with 3 authors

Beatty, C.D., K. Beirinckx, and T.N. Sherratt. 2004. The evolution of müllerian mimicry in multispecies communities. Nature 431:63–66.

A journal article with 10 or more authors

Shav-Tal, Y., X. Darzacq, S.M. Shenoy, D. Fusco, S.M. Janicki, D.L. Spector, and R.H. Singer. 2004. Dynamics of single mRNPs in nuclei of living cells. Science 304:1797–1800.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Gadd, K. 2016. TRIZ für Ingenieure. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany.

An edited book

Schatzker, J. 2005. The Rationale of Operative Fracture Care. Third Edition. (M. Tile, ed.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. XXIV, 668 p. 1718 illus., 321 illus. in color pp.

A chapter in an edited book

Krause, J., C. Langhirt, A. Sterff, B. Pehlke, and M. Döring. 2010. Data Access. Pp. 165–254 in SharePoint 2010 as a Development Platform (C. Langhirt, A. Sterff, B. Pehlke, and M. Döring, eds.). Apress, Berkeley, CA.

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 Herpetologica.

Blog post

Andrew, D. 2016. We Have Almost Certainly Blown The 1.5-Degree Global Warming Target. IFLScience. Available at https://www.iflscience.com/environment/we-have-almost-certainly-blown-the-15degree-global-warming-target/.

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. 2016. National Mediation Board: Progress Made on Some GAO Recommendations to Strengthen Operations, but Key Controls Continue to Be Needed. 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

Wheeler, T.J. 2009. Efficient construction of accurate multiple alignments and large-scale phylogenies. University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.

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

Howard, J.C., and S.F. Kovaleski. 2016. Atticus, Here’s Drama on Your Turf. New York Times C1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smaglik 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Smaglik 2004; Mullen and Mullins 2014).

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

Two authors: (Mullen and Mullins 2014)
Three or more authors: (Shav-Tal et al. 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	Herpetologica
Abbreviation	Herpetologica
ISSN (print)	0018-0831
ISSN (online)	1938-5099
Scope	Animal Science and Zoology Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics