How to format your references using the Ecological Processes citation style

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

Powell K (2003) Growing pains. Nature 423:568–569

A journal article with 2 authors

Dagan T, Martin W (2009) Microbiology. Seeing green and red in diatom genomes. Science 324:1651–1652

A journal article with 3 authors

Okabe Y, Sano T, Nagata S (2009) Regulation of the innate immune response by threonine-phosphatase of Eyes absent. Nature 460:520–524

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Lea DW, Pak DK, Peterson LC, Hughen KA (2003) Synchroneity of tropical and high-latitude Atlantic temperatures over the last glacial termination. Science 301:1361–1364

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Arifin SMN, Madey GR, Collins FH (2016) Spatial Agent-Based Simulation Modeling in Public Health. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Becker W (ed) (2015) Advanced Time-Correlated Single Photon Counting Applications. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Vitousek P, Beamer K (2013) Traditional Ecological Values, Knowledge, and Practices in Twenty-First Century Hawai‘i. In: Rozzi R, Pickett STA, Palmer C, et al. (eds) Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World: Values, Philosophy, and Action. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 63–70

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 Ecological Processes.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) Cassini Probes Lakes On Titan. In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 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

Government Accountability Office (2011) Hurricanes Katrina and Rita: Temporary Emergency Impact Aid Provided Education Support for Displaced Students. 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

Niedringhaus B (2012) Best Practice in Early Reading Intervention: Implementing a Reading Intervention Program to Reach Below Level Readers. Doctoral dissertation, Lindenwood University

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

Dynarski S (2016) A Conveyor Belt of Dropouts and Debt. New York Times BU6

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Powell 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Powell 2003; Dagan and Martin 2009).

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

Two authors: (Dagan and Martin 2009)
Three or more authors: (Lea et al. 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Ecological Processes
Abbreviation	Ecol. Process.
ISSN (online)	2192-1709
Scope