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

Edgerton, D. 2008. The charge of technology. Nature, 455:1030–1031.

A journal article with 2 authors

Hsieh, J. and J. W. Schneider. 2013. Neuroscience. Neural stem cells, excited. Science, 339:1534–1535.

A journal article with 3 authors

Davidson, E. A., S. E. Trumbore and R. Amundson. 2000. Soil warming and organic carbon content. Nature, 408:789–790.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Konishi, Y., J. Stegmüller, T. Matsuda, S. Bonni and A. Bonni. 2004. Cdh1-APC controls axonal growth and patterning in the mammalian brain. Science, 303:1026–1030.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Stavroudis, O. N. 2006. The Mathematics of Geometrical and Physical Optics. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, FRG.

An edited book

Danieli, G. A., A. Minelli and T. Pievani (eds). 2013. Stephen J. Gould: The Scientific Legacy. Springer, Milano. VIII, 208 p p.

A chapter in an edited book

Suzuki, S. 2012. The Kyoto School and J.F. Herbart. p. 41–53. In: P. Standish and N. Saito (eds.). Education and the Kyoto School of Philosophy: Pedagogy for Human Transformation. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

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

Hale, T. 2016. These Guys Built Iron Man’s Laser Firing Gauntlet And Captain America’s Shield. 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. 1978. Federal Computer Systems Protection Act of 1978 (S. 1766). 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

Marquez, H. H. 2017. Social Capital, Academics, and Sense of Belonging among High School Foster Youth. California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, 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

Poniewozik, J. 2016. On Trump and Clinton, Letting the Chips Fall Where They May.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Edgerton, 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Edgerton, 2008; Hsieh and Schneider, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Hsieh and Schneider, 2013)
Three or more authors: (Konishi 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

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