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

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

ZWIER, T. S. 2004. Chemistry. The structure of protonated water clusters. Science (New York, N.Y.) 304:1119–1120.

A journal article with 2 authors

PANNING, M. & ROMANOWICZ, B. 2004. Inferences on flow at the base of Earth’s mantle based on seismic anisotropy. Science (New York, N.Y.) 303:351–353.

A journal article with 3 authors

MOLNAR, P., HOUSEMAN, G. A. & ENGLAND, P. C. 2006. Earth science: palaeo-altimetry of Tibet. Nature 444:E4; discussion E4-5.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

CHEN, F., HONG, H., SHI, S., GOEL, S., VALDOVINOS, H. F., HERNANDEZ, R., THEUER, C. P., BARNHART, T. E. & CAI, W. 2014. Engineering of hollow mesoporous silica nanoparticles for remarkably enhanced tumor active targeting efficacy. Scientific reports 4:5080.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

CHAPPELL, D. 2008. Parris’s Standard Form of Building Contract. Blackwell Science Ltd, Oxford, UK.

An edited book

WEICKERT, J., HEIN, M. & SCHIELE, B. (Eds.). 2013. Pattern Recognition: 35th German Conference, GCPR 2013, Saarbrücken, Germany, September 3-6, 2013. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. XVI, 448 p. 207 illus pp.

A chapter in an edited book

CLASEN, T. F. 2016. Intent to Impact – Diluted Safe Water Monitoring. Pp. 47–56 in Thomas, E. A. (ed.). Broken Pumps and Promises: Incentivizing Impact in Environmental Health. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

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 Tropical Ecology.

Blog post

ANDREW, E. 2014, April 7. Stress Can Alter Your Genome. 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. 2008. Information Technology: Management Improvements Needed on the Department of Homeland Security’s Next Generation Information Sharing System. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

NAWPAR, R. T. 2010. Uranyl glass for thermometry. 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

OTIS, J. 2016, December 8. In Debt, but Undaunted, a Mother Finds Her Home. New York Times:A28.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Zwier 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Panning & Romanowicz 2004, Zwier 2004).

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

Two authors: (Panning & Romanowicz 2004)
Three or more authors: (Chen et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Tropical Ecology
Abbreviation	J. Trop. Ecol.
ISSN (print)	0266-4674
ISSN (online)	1469-7831
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics