How to format your references using the Theoretical Population Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Theoretical Population Biology. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Yin, Q.-Z., 2004. Planetary science. Predicting the Sun’s oxygen isotope composition. Science 305, 1729–1730.
A journal article with 2 authors
Gorbunova, Y.V., Spitzer, N.C., 2002. Dynamic interactions of cyclic AMP transients and spontaneous Ca(2+) spikes. Nature 418, 93–96.
A journal article with 3 authors
Hu, D.L., Chan, B., Bush, J.W.M., 2003. The hydrodynamics of water strider locomotion. Nature 424, 663–666.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Gregg, P.M., Lin, J., Behn, M.D., Montési, L.G.J., 2007. Spreading rate dependence of gravity anomalies along oceanic transform faults. Nature 448, 183–187.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Balani, K., Verma, V., Agarwal, A., Narayan, R., 2014. Biosurfaces. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ.
An edited book
Bouvry, P., Kłopotek, M.A., Leprévost, F., Marciniak, M., Mykowiecka, A., Rybiński, H. (Eds.), 2012. Security and Intelligent Information Systems: International Joint Conferences, SIIS 2011, Warsaw, Poland, June 13-14, 2011, Revised Selected Papers, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
A chapter in an edited book
Wang, G.-G., Gandomi, A.H., Alavi, A.H., 2015. Study of Lagrangian and Evolutionary Parameters in Krill Herd Algorithm, in: Fister, I., Fister, I., Jr. (Eds.), Adaptation and Hybridization in Computational Intelligence, Adaptation, Learning, and Optimization. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 111–128.

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 Theoretical Population Biology.

Blog post
Andrew, E., 2014. Toddler Battles Xenomorphs in Amazing P5000 Powerloader Costume [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/technology/toddler-battles-xenomorphs-amazing-p5000-powerloader-costume/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1995. Denver International Airport (No. T-RCED/AIMD-95-184). 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
Kuqi, K., 2013. A matrix-Based Method for Optimizing the User Interface Design of Electronic Medical Record Systems (Doctoral dissertation). George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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
Stewart, J.B., 2017. Tax Cuts Are Easy, but a Tax Overhaul? Three Proposals to Make the Math Work. New York Times B1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Yin, 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Gorbunova and Spitzer, 2002; Yin, 2004).

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

  • Two authors: (Gorbunova and Spitzer, 2002)
  • Three or more authors: (Gregg et al., 2007)

About the journal

Full journal titleTheoretical Population Biology
AbbreviationTheor. Popul. Biol.
ISSN (print)0040-5809
ScopeEcology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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