How to format your references using the Herpetologica citation style

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

Justham, S. 2014. Astrophysics: Portrait of a doomed star. Nature 512:34–35.

A journal article with 2 authors

Anderson, B.L., and J. Winawer. 2005. Image segmentation and lightness perception. Nature 434:79–83.

A journal article with 3 authors

Quax, R., D. Kandhai, and P.M.A. Sloot. 2013. Information dissipation as an early-warning signal for the Lehman Brothers collapse in financial time series. Sci. Rep. 3:1898.

A journal article with 10 or more authors

Bollong, M.J., G. Lee, J.S. Coukos, … R.E. Moellering. 2018. A metabolite-derived protein modification integrates glycolysis with KEAP1-NRF2 signalling. Nature 562:600–604.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Mohan, N. 2014. Advanced Electric Drives. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Dhalla, N.S., M. Nagano, and B. Ostadal (eds.). 2011. Molecular Defects in Cardiovascular Disease. Springer, New York, NY. XVIII, 382 p. 78 illus., 31 illus. in color pp.

A chapter in an edited book

Ji, Y., G.T. Christopherson, M.W. Kluk, O. Amrani, W.M. Jackson, and L.J. Nesti. 2012. Heterotopic Ossification Following Musculoskeletal Trauma: Modeling Stem and Progenitor Cells in Their Microenvironment. Pp. 39–50 in Human Cell Transformation: Role of Stem Cells and the Microenvironment (J.S. Rhim and R. Kremer, eds.). Springer, New York, NY.

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 Herpetologica.

Blog post

Hale, T. 2015. Check Out An Old Toothbrush Vs A New Toothbrush Under An Electron Microscope. IFLScience. Available at https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/old-and-new-toothbrushes-put-under-electron-microscope/.

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. Commercial Space Transportation: Industry Trends and Key Issues Affecting Federal Oversight and International Competitiveness. 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

Mannar, N.K. 2017. Hri-Tech Consultants, LLC. California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Oestreich, J.R. 2017. Review: The Vienna Philharmonic Adds New Work, and Women. New York Times C5.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Justham 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Justham 2014; Anderson and Winawer 2005).

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

Two authors: (Anderson and Winawer 2005)
Three or more authors: (Bollong et al. 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Herpetologica
Abbreviation	Herpetologica
ISSN (print)	0018-0831
ISSN (online)	1938-5099
Scope	Animal Science and Zoology Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics