How to format your references using the Paleobiology citation style

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

Archer, D. 2003: Ocean science. Who threw that snowball? Science (New York, N.Y.) 302:791–792.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kimmins, S., and P. Sassone-Corsi. 2005: Chromatin remodelling and epigenetic features of germ cells. Nature 434:583–589.

A journal article with 3 authors

Balazs, A. C., T. Emrick, and T. P. Russell. 2006: Nanoparticle polymer composites: where two small worlds meet. Science (New York, N.Y.) 314:1107–1110.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Omiatek, D. M., A. J. Bressler, A.-S. Cans, A. M. Andrews, M. L. Heien, and A. G. Ewing. 2013: The real catecholamine content of secretory vesicles in the CNS revealed by electrochemical cytometry. Scientific reports 3:1447.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Parker, J. S., and R. L. Anderson. 2014: Low-Energy Lunar Trajectory Design. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, p.

An edited book

van Aartsengel, A. 2013: Handbook on Continuous Improvement Transformation: The Lean Six Sigma Framework and Systematic Methodology for Implementation. in S. Kurtoglu, ed. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, p.

A chapter in an edited book

Cal Neto, J. T., and C. Tomei. 2013: A Numerical Algorithm for Ambrosetti–Prodi Type Operators. Pp.65–74 in C. A. de Moura and C. S. Kubrusly, eds. The Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy (CFL) Condition: 80 Years After Its Discovery. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA.

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 Paleobiology.

Blog post

Andrew, D. 2015: Free Passes To National Parks Today. IFLScience. Downloaded from https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/free-passes-popular-national-parks-today/ on 30 October 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. 2005: Aviation Security: Better Planning Needed to Optimize Deployment of Checked Baggage Screening Systems. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, p.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Ashbran, M. C. 2011: Examining student learning in a physics pedagogical content knowledge course.Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CApp.

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

Rosenberg, E., and J. Surico. 2016: Beam Falls From a Crane, Killing 2 Workers in Queens. New York Times:A23.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Archer 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Archer 2003; Kimmins and Sassone-Corsi 2005).

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

Two authors: (Kimmins and Sassone-Corsi 2005)
Three or more authors: (Omiatek et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Paleobiology
Abbreviation	Paleobiology
ISSN (print)	0094-8373
ISSN (online)	1938-5331
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Palaeontology Ecology

Research and Writing Guides