How to format your references using the Oikos citation style

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

Heremans, J. P. 2014. Thermoelectricity: The ugly duckling. - Nature 508: 327–328.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kossinets, G. and Watts, D. J. 2006. Empirical analysis of an evolving social network. - Science 311: 88–90.

A journal article with 3 authors

Lynch, M., Koskella, B. and Schaack, S. 2006. Mutation pressure and the evolution of organelle genomic architecture. - Science 311: 1727–1730.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Harms, K. E., Wright, S. J., Calderón, O., Hernández, A. and Herre, E. A. 2000. Pervasive density-dependent recruitment enhances seedling diversity in a tropical forest. - Nature 404: 493–495.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Kesidis, G. 2007. An Introduction to Communication Network Analysis. - John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Vassighi, A. 2006. Thermal and Power Management of Integrated Circuits (M Sachdev, Ed.). - Springer US.

A chapter in an edited book

Sun, J., Li, X. and Zhan, Y. 2011. The Design of Image Similarity Tool Based on SCILAB. - In: Zeng, D. (ed), Applied Informatics and Communication: International Conference, ICAIC 2011,Xi’an, China, August 20-21, 2011, Proceedings, Part I. Communications in Computer and Information Science. Springer, pp. 25–32.

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 Oikos.

Blog post

Fang, J. 2015. Link Between Secondhand Smoke and Childhood Eczema Found. - 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 1992. Quantitative Data Analysis: An Introduction.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Berkowitz, E. S. 2013. Some novel phenomena at high density.

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

Novick, S. M. 2015. Turkey and Trimmings, Without Dishes to Do. - New York Times: LI11.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Heremans 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Kossinets and Watts 2006, Heremans 2014).

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

Two authors: (Kossinets and Watts 2006)
Three or more authors: (Harms et al. 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Oikos
Abbreviation	Oikos
ISSN (print)	0030-1299
ISSN (online)	1600-0706
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics