How to format your references using the Acta Oecologica citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Acta Oecologica. 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 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

Malartre, E., 2000. Words, words, words. Nature 406, 833.

A journal article with 2 authors

Aratyn-Schaus, Y., Gardel, M.L., 2008. Biophysics. Clutch dynamics. Science 322, 1646–1647.

A journal article with 3 authors

Lambert, J.B., Gurusamy-Thangavelu, S.A., Ma, K., 2010. The silicate-mediated formose reaction: bottom-up synthesis of sugar silicates. Science 327, 984–986.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Peng, C.Y., Manning, L., Albertson, R., Doe, C.Q., 2000. The tumour-suppressor genes lgl and dlg regulate basal protein targeting in Drosophila neuroblasts. Nature 408, 596–600.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

van Gumster, J., Shimonski, R., 2010. GIMP Bible. Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, USA.

An edited book

McFadden, J., Beste, D.J.V., Kierzek, A.M. (Eds.), 2013. Systems Biology of Tuberculosis. Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

Yu, G., Liu, Z., Yuan, J., 2015. Discriminative Orderlet Mining for Real-Time Recognition of Human-Object Interaction, in: Cremers, D., Reid, I., Saito, H., Yang, M.-H. (Eds.), Computer Vision -- ACCV 2014: 12th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, Singapore, Singapore, November 1-5, 2014, Revised Selected Papers, Part V, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 50–65.

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 Oecologica.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2014. Amazing Video Of A Mantis Shrimp Spearing A Fish In Slow Motion [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/amazing-video-mantis-shrimp-spearing-fish-slow-motion-0/ (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, 2013. Transportation Security: TSA Could Strengthen Monitoring of Allegations of Employee Misconduct (No. GAO-13-624). 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

Sachdev, N.A., 2012. An Evaluation of the District of Columbia Summer Youth Employment Program (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

Williams, J., 2017. Ruminations on the Inquiring Mind. New York Times C6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Malartre, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Aratyn-Schaus and Gardel, 2008; Malartre, 2000).

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

Two authors: (Aratyn-Schaus and Gardel, 2008)
Three or more authors: (Peng et al., 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Acta Oecologica
Abbreviation	Acta Oecol. (Montrouge)
ISSN (print)	1146-609X
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Nature and Landscape Conservation