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

JARVIS, M. J. 2001. Atmospheric science. Bridging the atmospheric divide. Science (New York, N.Y.) 293:2218–2219.

A journal article with 2 authors

SPRINZAK, D. & ELOWITZ, M. B. 2005. Reconstruction of genetic circuits. Nature 438:443–448.

A journal article with 3 authors

SOLOMON, B. R., HYDER, M. N. & VARANASI, K. K. 2014. Separating oil-water nanoemulsions using flux-enhanced hierarchical membranes. Scientific reports 4:5504.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

MIDDEY, S., RIVERO, P., MEYERS, D., KAREEV, M., LIU, X., CAO, Y., FREELAND, J. W., BARRAZA-LOPEZ, S. & CHAKHALIAN, J. 2014. Polarity compensation in ultra-thin films of complex oxides: the case of a perovskite nickelate. Scientific reports 4:6819.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

MORROW, E., BOAZ, A., BREARLEY, S. & ROSS, F. 2011. Handbook of Service User Involvement in Nursing and Healthcare Research. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK.

An edited book

AMMAR, A. & BERNSTEIN, M. (Eds.). 2014. Neurosurgical Ethics in Practice: Value-based Medicine. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. XII, 286 p. 22 illus., 8 illus. in color pp.

A chapter in an edited book

GONZAGA DE OLIVEIRA, S. L., DE ABREU, A. A. A. M., ROBAINA, D. & KISCHINHEVSKY, M. 2016. A New Heuristic for Bandwidth and Profile Reductions of Matrices Using a Self-organizing Map. Pp. 54–70 in Gervasi, O., Murgante, B., Misra, S., Rocha, A. M. A. C., Torre, C. M., Taniar, D., Apduhan, B. O., Stankova, E. & Wang, S. (eds.). Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2016: 16th International Conference, Beijing, China, July 4-7, 2016, Proceedings, Part I. 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. 2013, October 1. The True Price of Shark Fin Soup. 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. 2009. V-22 Osprey Aircraft: Assessments Needed to Address Operational and Cost Concerns to Define Future Investments. 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

BOYLE, C. N. 2013. Support program for transition age youth: A grant proposal. 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

FERNANDEZ, M. & SOUTHALL, A. 2015, June 14. Suspect Dead After Gun and Bomb Attack on Dallas Police. New York Times:A16.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Jarvis 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Jarvis 2001, Sprinzak & Elowitz 2005).

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

Two authors: (Sprinzak & Elowitz 2005)
Three or more authors: (Middey 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