How to format your references using the Limnology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Limnology. 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

Dalton R (2005) California stem-cell institute fights legal challenges. Nature 435:544

A journal article with 2 authors

Segers VFM, Lee RT (2008) Stem-cell therapy for cardiac disease. Nature 451:937–942

A journal article with 3 authors

Barna M, Pandolfi PP, Niswander L (2005) Gli3 and Plzf cooperate in proximal limb patterning at early stages of limb development. Nature 436:277–281

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Yu B, Edstrom WC, Benach J, et al (2006) Crystal structures of catalytic complexes of the oxidative DNA/RNA repair enzyme AlkB. Nature 439:879–884

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Barnes T (2013) Constantine. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Oxford

An edited book

Martella C (2015) Practical Graph Analytics with Apache Giraph. Apress, Berkeley, CA

A chapter in an edited book

Xu F, Lu T (2011) Skin Mechanical Behaviour. In: Lu T (ed) Introduction to Skin Biothermomechanics and Thermal Pain. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 87–104

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 Limnology.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) Surinam Toad Childbirth: Trypophobics Need Not Apply. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/surinam-toad-childbirth-trypophobics-need-not-apply/. Accessed 30 Oct 2018

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 (2007) Business Systems Modernization: Air Force Needs to Fully Define Policies and Procedures for Institutionally Managing 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

Cannon CA (2017) Comparison of language arts scores between computerized and teacher differentiation of instruction. Doctoral dissertation, Capella 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

Landler M, Risen J (2017) Mineral Wealth In Afghanistan Tempts Trump. New York Times A1

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Dalton 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Dalton 2005; Segers and Lee 2008).

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

Two authors: (Segers and Lee 2008)
Three or more authors: (Yu et al. 2006)

About the journal

Full journal title	Limnology
Abbreviation	Limnology (Tokyo)
ISSN (print)	1439-8621
ISSN (online)	1439-863X
Scope	Aquatic Science Ecology Water Science and Technology