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

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

Chyba, C. F. 2000. Energy for microbial life on Europa. Nature 403:381–382.

A journal article with 2 authors

Sallan, L., and A. K. Galimberti. 2015. Body-size reduction in vertebrates following the end-Devonian mass extinction. Science (New York, N.Y.) 350:812–815.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bernevig, B. A., T. L. Hughes, and S.-C. Zhang. 2006. Quantum spin Hall effect and topological phase transition in HgTe quantum wells. Science (New York, N.Y.) 314:1757–1761.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Bertaina, S., S. Gambarelli, T. Mitra, B. Tsukerblat, A. Müller, and B. Barbara. 2008. Quantum oscillations in a molecular magnet. Nature 453:203–206.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Binnie, C. 2016. Linux Server Security. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Indianapolis, IN, USA.

An edited book

Retolaza, J. L. 2016. Social Accounting for Sustainability: Monetizing the Social Value. (L. San-José & M. Ruíz-Roqueñi, eds.)SpringerBriefs in Business. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Hilton, A. 2014. Teacher to Academic. Pages 31–42 in N. Lemon and S. Garvis, eds. Being “In and Out”: Providing Voice to Early Career Women in Academia. SensePublishers, Rotterdam.

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 Naturalist.

Blog post

Andrews, R. 2016. Titanosaur Footprint In Gobi Desert Is One Of The Largest Ever Found. IFLScience. 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. 1975. College Work-Study Program at the Bay College of Maryland (No. 089626). 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

Park, J. K. 2012. Target Identification, Therapeutic Application and Maturation Mechanism of microRNAs (Doctoral dissertation). Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.

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

Greenhouse, L. 2007. Ruling Seen as Giving an Edge to Challengers of Patents. New York Times, p. C3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Chyba 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Chyba 2000; Sallan and Galimberti 2015).

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

Two authors: (Sallan and Galimberti 2015)
Three or more authors: (Bertaina et al. 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	The American Naturalist
Abbreviation	Am. Nat.
ISSN (print)	0003-0147
ISSN (online)	1537-5323
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics