How to format your references using the Journal of Natural History citation style

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

Houston SD. 2006. Anthropology. An example of Preclassic Mayan writing? Science. 311:1249–1250.

A journal article with 2 authors

Pollard D, DeConto RM. 2009. Modelling West Antarctic ice sheet growth and collapse through the past five million years. Nature. 458:329–332.

A journal article with 3 authors

Doebeli M, Hauert C, Killingback T. 2004. The evolutionary origin of cooperators and defectors. Science. 306:859–862.

A journal article with 12 or more authors

Dürr M, Biedermann A, Hu Z, Höfer U, Heinz TF. 2002. Probing high-barrier pathways of surface reactions by scanning tunneling microscopy. Science. 296:1838–1841.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Primak SL, Kontorovich V. 2011. Wireless Multi-Antenna Channels. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Ieda H, editor. 2010. Sustainable Urban Transport in an Asian Context. Tokyo: Springer Japan.

A chapter in an edited book

Flesca S, Furfaro F, Parisi F. 2011. Computing Card-minimal Repairs. In: Furfaro F, Parisi F, editors. Repairing and Querying Databases under Aggregate Constraints. New York, NY: Springer; p. 33–45.

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 Natural History.

Blog post

Davis J. 2017. Bacteria May Be Altering Your Brain To Suppress Your Appetite When You’re Sick. IFLScience [Internet]. [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/bacteria-may-be-altering-your-brain-to-suppress-your-appetite-when-youre-sick/

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. 1999. Year 2000 Computing Crisis: Readiness of the Telecommunications Industry. 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

Parsons AT. 2010. Metal-catalyzed annulations of strained cycloalkanes [Doctoral dissertation]. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina.

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

Dominus S. 2015. Double Lives. New York Times.:MM34.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Houston 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Houston 2006; Pollard and DeConto 2009).

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

Two authors: (Pollard and DeConto 2009)
Three or more authors: (Dürr et al. 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Natural History
Abbreviation	J. Nat. Hist.
ISSN (print)	0022-2933
ISSN (online)	1464-5262
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics