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

O’Neill, L.A.J., 2013, Immunology. Sensing the dark side of DNA: Science (New York, N.Y.), v. 339, p. 763–764.

A journal article with 2 authors

Barres, B.A., and Smith, S.J., 2001, Neurobiology. Cholesterol--making or breaking the synapse: Science (New York, N.Y.), v. 294, p. 1296–1297.

A journal article with 3 authors

Huang, S., Bai, M., and Wang, L., 2013, General and facile surface functionalization of hydrophobic nanocrystals with poly(amino acid) for cell luminescence imaging: Scientific Reports, v. 3, p. 2023.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Grine, F.E., Bailey, R.M., Harvati, K., Nathan, R.P., Morris, A.G., Henderson, G.M., Ribot, I., and Pike, A.W.G., 2007, Late Pleistocene human skull from Hofmeyr, South Africa, and modern human origins: Science (New York, N.Y.), v. 315, p. 226–229.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Smed, J., and Hakonen, H., 2006, Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games: Chichester, UK, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, .

An edited book

2011, Secure and Trust Computing, Data Management, and Applications: STA 2011 Workshops: IWCS 2011 and STAVE 2011, Loutraki, Greece, June 28-30, 2011. Proceedings (Lee, C., Seigneur, J.-M., Park, J.J., and Wagner, R.R., eds.): Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer, XVI, 205 p p.

A chapter in an edited book

Hamilton, M.L., and Pinnegar, S., 2014, Interpretation and Gender Within the Zone of Inconclusivity, in Taylor, M. and Coia, L., eds., Gender, Feminism, and Queer Theory in the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices: Rotterdam, SensePublishers, p. 45–60.

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

Fang, J., 2014, Digital Metamaterials Get Us Closer to Invisibility Cloaks. IFLScience. Available at https://www.iflscience.com/technology/digital-metamaterials-get-us-closer-invisibility-cloaks/. 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, 2016, Intellectual Property: Patent Office Should Define Quality, Reassess Incentives, and Improve Clarity: 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

Kapatsinski, V., 2009, The architecture of grammar in artificial grammar learning: Formal biases in the acquisition of morphophonology and the nature of the learning task [Doctoral dissertation]: Bloomington, IN, Indiana 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

Gelles, D., and de la MERCED, M.J., 2017, Torch Passes At Carlyle As a Titan Steps Aside: New York Times, p. B1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (O’Neill, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Barres and Smith, 2001; O’Neill, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Barres and Smith, 2001)
Three or more authors: (Grine et al., 2007)

About the journal

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

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