How to format your references using the The American Midland Naturalist citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The American Midland Naturalist. 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

Yayanos, A. A. 2002. Are cells viable at gigapascal pressures? Science, 297:295.

A journal article with 2 authors

Yang, X. and X. Lu. 2014. Drastic change in China’s lakes and reservoirs over the past decades. Sci. Rep., 4:6041.

A journal article with 3 authors

Christian, W., F. Esquembre and L. Barbato. 2011. SPORE series winner. Open source physics. Science, 334:1077–1078.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Roy, D., D. R. Liston, V. J. Idone, A. Di, D. J. Nelson, C. Pujol, J. B. Bliska, S. Chakrabarti and N. W. Andrews. 2004. A process for controlling intracellular bacterial infections induced by membrane injury. Science, 304:1515–1518.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

McMaster, M. C. 2010. Buying and Selling Laboratory Instruments. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Benedicks, M., P. W. Jones, S. Smirnov and B. Winckler (eds). 2005. Perspectives in Analysis: Essays in Honor of Lennart Carleson’s 75th Birthday. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. XIV, 378 p p.

A chapter in an edited book

Froehlich, J., E. Larson, E. Saba, T. Campbell, L. Atlas, J. Fogarty and S. Patel. 2011. A Longitudinal Study of Pressure Sensing to Infer Real-World Water Usage Events in the Home. p. 50–69. In: K. Lyons, J. Hightower, and E. M. Huang (eds.). Pervasive Computing: 9th International Conference, Pervasive 2011, San Francisco, USA, June 12-15, 2011. Proceedings. 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 The American Midland Naturalist.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J. 2016. There’s A Bunch Of Hidden Easter Eggs Inside The Source Code For The Apollo 11 Mission. 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. 1981. Repayment of Overpaid Cash-in-Lieu-of-Commodities Funds to Louisiana Youth Talent Promotion, Inc. 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

Yoon, Y. 2010. Nano-tribology of discrete track recording media. University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA.

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

Sisario, B. 2017. Ed Sheeran’s ‘Divide’ Breaks a Global Record.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Yayanos, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Yayanos, 2002; Yang and Lu, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Yang and Lu, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Roy et al., 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	The American Midland Naturalist
Abbreviation	Am. Midl. Nat.
ISSN (print)	0003-0031
ISSN (online)	1938-4238
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics