How to format your references using the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology citation style

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

Tutu, D. 2011. Genome-sequencing anniversary. My genome. Science (New York, N.Y.), 331, 689.

A journal article with 2 authors

Panthi, D. & Tsutsumi, A. 2014. Micro-tubular solid oxide fuel cell based on a porous yttria-stabilized zirconia support. Scientific reports, 4, 5754.

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang, Z., Huang, X. & Lu, H. 2014. Association between red blood cell transfusion and bronchopulmonary dysplasia in preterm infants. Scientific reports, 4, 4340.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Kovalchuk, Y., Hanse, E., Kafitz, K. W. & Konnerth, A. 2002. Postsynaptic Induction of BDNF-Mediated Long-Term Potentiation. Science (New York, N.Y.), 295, 1729–1734.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Morris, S. A. 2011. Food and Package Engineering. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK pp.

An edited book

Cotta, C., Reich, S., Schaefer, R. & Ligęza, A. (eds). 2008. Knowledge-Driven Computing: Knowledge Engineering and Intelligent Computations. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, Studies in Computational Intelligence, XVII, 324 p pp.

A chapter in an edited book

Karasawa, K., Kitasaka, T., Oda, M., Nimura, Y., Hayashi, Y., Fujiwara, M., Misawa, K., Rueckert, D. & Mori, K. 2016. Structure Specific Atlas Generation and Its Application to Pancreas Segmentation from Contrasted Abdominal CT Volumes. In: Menze, B., Langs, G., Montillo, A., Kelm, M., Müller, H., Zhang, S., Cai, W. & Metaxas, D. (eds) Medical Computer Vision: Algorithms for Big Data: International Workshop, MCV 2015, Held in Conjunction with MICCAI 2015, Munich, Germany, October 9, 2015, Revised Selected Papers. Springer International Publishing, Cham, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 47–56.

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 Systematic Palaeontology.

Blog post

Carpineti, A. 2016. No, There Was No Special Facebook Live Feed From The ISS Today. IFLScience. World Wide Web Address: https://www.iflscience.com/space/no-there-was-no-special-facebook-live-feed-from-the-iss-today/.

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. Paul G. Dembling. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, OP-6-OH pp.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Dillon, M. 2014. Active Aging Program for Older Adults with Early Stage Dementia. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach.

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

Greenhouse, L. 2007. Supreme Court Hears Medical Device Case. New York Times, C3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Tutu 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Tutu 2011; Panthi & Tsutsumi 2014).

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

Two authors: (Panthi & Tsutsumi 2014)
Three or more authors: (Kovalchuk et al. 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Systematic Palaeontology
Abbreviation	J. Syst. Palaeontol.
ISSN (print)	1477-2019
ISSN (online)	1478-0941
Scope	Palaeontology

Research and Writing Guides