How to format your references using the Journal of Applied Ecology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Applied 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

Desiraju, G. R. (2004). Midsummer madness. Nature, 431(7004), 25.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gebhardt, J. C. M., & Rief, M. (2009). Biochemistry. Force signaling in biology. Science (New York, N.Y.), 324(5932), 1278–1280.

A journal article with 3 authors

Leizerson, I., Lipson, S. G., & Lyushnin, A. V. (2003). Wetting properties: When larger drops evaporate faster. Nature, 422(6930), 395–396.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Ding, X., Zhao, L., Chu, H., Tong, N., Ni, C., Hu, Z., … Wang, M. (2014). Assessing the effectiveness of problem-based learning of preventive medicine education in China. Scientific Reports, 4, 5126.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Belfiore, L. A. (2010). Physical Properties of Macromolecules. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Fleenor, B. S. (2015). Arterial Stiffness: Implications and Interventions (A. J. Berrones, Ed.). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Wiersinga, W. M. (2015). Smoking and Prevention of Thyroid Eye Disease. In R. S. Douglas, A. N. McCoy, & S. Gupta (Eds.), Thyroid Eye Disease (pp. 39–51). New York, NY: Springer.

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 Journal of Applied Ecology.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2014, April 26). Birds Adapting to Chernobyl’s Radiation. Retrieved October 30, 2018, from IFLScience website: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/birds-adapting-chernobyls-radiation/

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. (1988). Space Exploration: Cost, Schedule, and Performance of NASA’s Galileo Mission to Jupiter (No. NSIAD-88-138FS). 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

Buchigari, S. R. (2010). A tool to automate the process of Unit testing of webapplications (Criterion V1.0) (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Hollander, S. (2002, September 13). Staten Island Wins Championship of Class A League Again. New York Times, p. D3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Desiraju, 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Desiraju, 2004; Gebhardt & Rief, 2009).

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

Two authors: (Gebhardt & Rief, 2009)
Three authors: (Leizerson, Lipson, & Lyushnin, 2003)
6 or more authors: (Ding et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Applied Ecology
Abbreviation	J. Appl. Ecol.
ISSN (print)	0021-8901
ISSN (online)	1365-2664
Scope	Ecology