How to format your references using the Journal of Paleontology citation style

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

Weydt, P., 2000, Biomedical centre memorial to victims of Nazi research: Nature, v. 403, p. 816.

A journal article with 2 authors

Felsenfeld, G., and Groudine, M., 2003, Controlling the double helix: Nature, v. 421, p. 448–453.

A journal article with 3 authors

Spencer, J.P., Dineva, E., and Smith, L.B., 2009, Comment on “Infants’ perseverative search errors are induced by pragmatic misinterpretation”: Science (New York, N.Y.), v. 325, p. 1624; author reply 1624.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Prochnik, S.E., Umen, J., Nedelcu, A.M., Hallmann, A., Miller, S.M., Nishii, I., Ferris, P., Kuo, A., Mitros, T., Fritz-Laylin, L.K., Hellsten, U., Chapman, J., Simakov, O., Rensing, S.A., Terry, A., Pangilinan, J., Kapitonov, V., Jurka, J., Salamov, A., Shapiro, H., Schmutz, J., Grimwood, J., Lindquist, E., Lucas, S., Grigoriev, I.V., Schmitt, R., Kirk, D., and Rokhsar, D.S., 2010, Genomic analysis of organismal complexity in the multicellular green alga Volvox carteri: Science (New York, N.Y.), v. 329, p. 223–226.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Grinshpan, L., 2012, Solving Enterprise Applications Performance Puzzles: Hoboken, NJ, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., .

An edited book

2014, Contemporary Developments in Statistical Theory: A Festschrift for Hira Lal Koul (Lahiri, S., Schick, A., SenGupta, A., and Sriram, T.N., eds.): Cham, Springer International Publishing, XI, 396 p. 160 illus., 60 illus. in color p.

A chapter in an edited book

Simoen, E., and Lombaert, G., 2016, Bayesian Parameter Estimation, in Chatzi, E. and Papadimitriou, C., eds., Identification Methods for Structural Health Monitoring, CISM International Centre for Mechanical Sciences: Cham, Springer International Publishing, p. 89–115.

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 Paleontology.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2015, Lone Grand Canyon Wolf Confirmed Dead. IFLScience. Available at https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/lone-grand-canyon-wolf-confirmed-dead/. Accessed October 30, 2018 IFLScience.

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, 1990, Administrative Systems: NASA Should Reassess Its AIM Program and Rescind Its IBM-Compatible Policy: 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

Banerjee, S., 2013, A mathematical model for the transition in firing patterns across puberty of a gonadotropin-releasing hormone neuron [Doctoral dissertation]: Columbus, OH, Ohio State University.

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

Walsh, M.W., 2011, Claiming Fraud in A.I.G. Bailout, Whistle-Blower Lawsuit Names 3 Companies: New York Times, p. B6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Weydt, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Weydt, 2000; Felsenfeld and Groudine, 2003).

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

Two authors: (Felsenfeld and Groudine, 2003)
Three or more authors: (Prochnik et al., 2010)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Paleontology
Abbreviation	J. Paleontol.
ISSN (print)	0022-3360
ISSN (online)	1937-2337
Scope	Palaeontology