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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Vertebrate 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Hughes, V. 2010. The outlook for a cure. Nature 466:S11-3.

A journal article with 2 authors

Weston, C. R., and R. J. Davis. 2001. Signal transduction: signaling specificity- a complex affair. Science (New York, N.Y.) 292:2439–2440.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bhowmick, N. A., E. G. Neilson, and H. L. Moses. 2004. Stromal fibroblasts in cancer initiation and progression. Nature 432:332–337.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Solovyov, V. F., T. Ozaki, A. Atrei, L. Wu, A. Al-Mahboob, J. T. Sadowski, X. Tong, D. Nykypanchuk, and Q. Li. 2014. Highly efficient solid state catalysis by reconstructed (001) ceria surface. Scientific Reports 4:4627.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Cauvin, C., F. Escobar, and A. Serradj. 2013. Thematic Cartography and Transformations. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, pp.

An edited book

2010. Advances in Computational Biology (H. R. Arabnia (ed.)). Springer, New York, NY, XVII, 759 p pp.

A chapter in an edited book

Jiménez Urroz, J. 2008. Almost Prime Orders of CM Elliptic Curves Modulo p; pp. 74–87 in A. J. van der Poorten and A. Stein (eds.), Algorithmic Number Theory: 8th International Symposium, ANTS-VIII Banff, Canada, May 17-22, 2008 Proceedings., . Lecture Notes in Computer Science Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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 Vertebrate Paleontology.

Blog post

Taub, B. 2016. Archaeologists Have Discovered A Brand New Ancient God. IFLScience. Available at https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/archaeologists-discovered-brand-new-ancient-god/. 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. Rail Grant Oversight: Greater Adherence to Leading Practices Needed to Improve Grants Management. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, pp.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Duncan, E. A. 2017. Environmental controls of black abalone body temperature determine risks of thermal stress and disease. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA pp.

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

Dudziak, M. L. 2012. This War Is Not Over Yet. New York Times A31.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Hughes, 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Weston and Davis, 2001; Hughes, 2010).

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

Two authors: (Weston and Davis, 2001)
Three or more authors: (Solovyov et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology
Abbreviation	J. Vertebr. Paleontol.
ISSN (print)	0272-4634
ISSN (online)	1937-2809
Scope	Palaeontology