Biology / Environmental Studies 226: Conservation Biology

When you use Zotero to generate citations, you must check your citations for formatting errors and be prepared to make edits. See guidance on formatting citations in Nature style below.

In Nature style, the most common errors to watch out for are:

• Capitalization of article titles: The titles of articles should be written in sentence case, meaning the title is capitalized as if it were a sentence.

• Italicization of genus/species names: The genus and species names of organisms should always be written in italics, and genus names should always be capitalized. Example: Acer saccharum.

• Abbreviation of journal titles: All journal titles that are longer than one word are written in an abbreviated format. You can look up the abbreviations for specific journals here. Note that journal titles which are only one word long, such as Nature or Biogeosciences, are not abbreviated.

The journal Nature provides the following instructions for citing sources:

• References are each numbered, ordered sequentially as they appear in the text, tables, boxes, figure legends, Methods, Extended Data tables and Extended Data figure legends.

• When cited in the text, reference numbers are superscript, not in brackets unless they are likely to be confused with a superscript number.

• Authors should be listed surname first, followed by a comma and initials of given names. All authors should be included in reference lists unless there are more than five, in which case only the first author should be given, followed by ‘et al.’.

• Titles of all cited articles are required. Titles of articles cited in reference lists should be in upright, not italic text; the first word of the title is capitalized, the title written exactly as it appears in the work cited, ending with a full stop. Book titles are italic with all main words capitalized. Journal titles are italic and abbreviated according to common usage. Volume numbers are bold. The publisher and city of publication are required for books cited. (Refer to published papers in Nature for details.)

• References to web-only journals should give authors, article title and journal name as above, followed by URL in full - or DOI if known - and the year of publication in parentheses.

• References to websites should give authors if known, title of cited page, URL in full, and year of posting in parentheses.

Journal Articles with 1 to 5 authors:

Eisenhauer, N. The action of an animal ecosystem engineer: identification of the main mechanisms of earthworm impacts on soil microarthropods. Pedobiologia 53, 343–352 (2010).

Anthony, M. A., Bender, S. F. & van der Heijden, M. G. A. Enumerating soil biodiversity. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 120, e2304663120 (2023).

Journal Article with 6+ authors:

Lavelle, P. et al. Soil macroinvertebrate communities: a world-wide assessment. Glob. Ecol. Biogeogr. 31, 1261–1276 (2022).

Book:

Mayr, G. Paleogene Fossil Birds (Springer International Publishing, 2022).

Book Chapter:

Wurst, S., Sonnemann, I. & Zaller, J. G. in Aboveground–Belowground Community Ecology (eds Ohgushi, T. et al.) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91614-9_8 (2018).