How to format your references using the Functional Ecology citation style

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

Sukhdev, P. (2009). Costing the earth. Nature, 462(7271), 277.

A journal article with 2 authors

O’Higgins, P., & Elton, S. (2007). Anthropology. Walking on trees. Science (New York, N.Y.), 316(5829), 1292–1294.

A journal article with 3 authors

Zinchuk, V., Wu, Y., & Grossenbacher-Zinchuk, O. (2013). Bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative colocalization results in fluorescence microscopy studies. Scientific Reports, 3, 1365.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Bartels, L., Wang, F., Möller, D., Knoesel, E., & Heinz, T. F. (2004). Real-space observation of molecular motion induced by femtosecond laser pulses. Science (New York, N.Y.), 305(5684), 648–651.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Lynn, P. A. (2010). Electricity from Sunlight. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Ruyter, B. de, Wichert, R., Keyson, D. V., Markopoulos, P., Streitz, N., Divitini, M., Georgantas, N., & Mana Gomez, A. (Eds.). (2010). Ambient Intelligence: First International Joint Conference, AmI 2010, Malaga, Spain, November 10-12, 2010. Proceedings (Vol. 6439). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Kang, J., & Sim, K. M. (2009). A Brokering Protocol for Agent-Based Grid Resource Discovery. In D. Ślęzak, T.-H. Kim, S. S. Yau, O. Gervasi, & B.-H. Kang (Eds.), Grid and Distributed Computing: International Conference, GDC 2009, Held as Part of the Future Generation Information Technology Conferences, FGIT 2009, Jeju Island, Korea, December 10-12, 2009. Proceedings (pp. 33–40). Springer.

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 Functional Ecology.

Blog post

Luntz, S. (2017, May 16). Folk Contraceptive “Thunder God Vine” Contains Chemicals That Really Prevent Conception. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/folk-contraceptive-thunder-god-vine-contains-chemicals-that-really-prevent-conception/

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. (1987). University Funding: Patterns of Distribution of Federal Research Funds to Universities (RCED-87-67BR). U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Salifu, A. (2008). Names that prick: Royal praise names in Dagbon, northern Ghana [Doctoral dissertation]. Indiana 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

Saslow, L. (2008, February 10). Other School Districts Offered State Intervention. New York Times, LI2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sukhdev, 2009).
This sentence cites two references (O’Higgins & Elton, 2007; Sukhdev, 2009).

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

Two authors: (O’Higgins & Elton, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Bartels et al., 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	Functional Ecology
Abbreviation	Funct. Ecol.
ISSN (print)	0269-8463
ISSN (online)	1365-2435
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics