How to format your references using the Oecologia citation style

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

Shen MM (2015) Cancer: The complex seeds of metastasis. Nature 520:298–299

A journal article with 2 authors

Kim N, Grey CP (2002) Probing oxygen motion in disordered anionic conductors with 17O and 51V MAS NMR spectroscopy. Science 297:1317–1320

A journal article with 3 authors

Lee J, Park J, Choi C (2014) Identification of phenotype deterministic genes using systemic analysis of transcriptional response. Sci Rep 4:4413

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Opris I, Santos L, Gerhardt GA, et al (2013) Prefrontal cortical microcircuits bind perception to executive control. Sci Rep 3:2285

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ezra D, Collie B, Smith MX (2009) The Retirement Plan Solution. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Battin-Leclerc F, Simmie JM, Blurock E (eds) (2013) Cleaner Combustion: Developing Detailed Chemical Kinetic Models. Springer, London

A chapter in an edited book

Yu WH, Yang Y, Park KN, Lim H (2012) Sentiment-Property Extraction Using Korean Syntactic Features. In: Park JJ (jong H, Leung VCM, Wang C-L, Shon T (eds) Future Information Technology, Application, and Service: FutureTech 2012 Volume 2. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 23–30

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 Oecologia.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Watch TV Hosts Argue About Whether The Moon Is A Star Or Planet. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/shopping-channel-hosts-argue-whether-moon-star-or-planet/. 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 (2014) Small Business Research Programs: More Guidance and Oversight Needed to Comply with Spending and Reporting Requirements. 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

Allard L (2006) Exposure to Low-Level Ionizing Radiation and Risk of Leukemia and Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in Participants of the Fernald Medical Monitoring Program. Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati

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

Pilon M (2012) Far From a Straight Shot to a Milestone Achievement. New York Times D2

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Shen 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Kim and Grey 2002; Shen 2015).

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

Two authors: (Kim and Grey 2002)
Three or more authors: (Opris et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Oecologia
Abbreviation	Oecologia
ISSN (print)	0029-8549
ISSN (online)	1432-1939
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics