How to format your references using the Acta Ecologica Sinica citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Acta Ecologica Sinica. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

[1]

A.V. Olinto, Cosmic rays: the highest-energy messengers, Science 315 (2007) 68–70.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

C.F. McKee, J.C. Tan, Massive star formation in 100,000 years from turbulent and pressurized molecular clouds, Nature 416 (2002) 59–61.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

S.M. Carbotte, C. Small, K. Donnelly, The influence of ridge migration on the magmatic segmentation of mid-ocean ridges, Nature 429 (2004) 743–746.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

G.E. Kenney, L.M.K. Dassama, M.-E. Pandelia, A.S. Gizzi, R.J. Martinie, P. Gao, C.J. DeHart, L.F. Schachner, O.S. Skinner, S.Y. Ro, X. Zhu, M. Sadek, P.M. Thomas, S.C. Almo, J.M. Bollinger Jr, C. Krebs, N.L. Kelleher, A.C. Rosenzweig, The biosynthesis of methanobactin, Science 359 (2018) 1411–1416.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

L. Simon, Control of Biological and Drug-Delivery Systems for Chemical, Biomedical, and Pharmaceutical Engineering, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2013.

An edited book

[1]

J.P. Blass, ed., Neurochemical Mechanisms in Disease, 1st ed., Springer, New York, NY, 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

L. Jarecki, Kinetic Theory of Crystal Nucleation Under Transient Molecular Orientation, in: G. Reiter, G.R. Strobl (Eds.), Progress in Understanding of Polymer Crystallization, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007: pp. 65–86.

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 Acta Ecologica Sinica.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, As The US Heads To Climate Talks, It Seeks A Plan To ‘Trust But Verify,’ IFLScience (2015). https://www.iflscience.com/environment/us-heads-climate-talks-it-seeks-plan-trust-verify/ (accessed October 30, 2018).

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Mass Transit: Review of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District’s Airport Extension Finance Plan, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2000.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

R.A. Dasari, Automatic driving system by recognizing road signs using digital image processing, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2016.

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

[1]

B. Sisario, Bob Krasnow, 82, Executive Who Revived Elektra Records, New York Times (2016) A30.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Acta Ecologica Sinica
Abbreviation	Sheng Tai Xue Bao
ISSN (print)	1872-2032
Scope