Citations and references

How to cite Birds of the World

To cite a BOW Species Account or BOW Family Account:

To cite individual species or family accounts, please use the recommended citation at the bottom of the page of the account. This citation includes both the version number and URL (with DOI) needed to identify the specific version of the account you wish to cite. Note that the editor(s) listed will vary from account to account, so again, it is important to use the BOW recommended citation.

To cite Birds of the World as a whole (for example, you want to refer to the series in general or you have used content from many accounts):

Birds of the World (2022). Edited by S. M. Billerman, B. K. Keeney, P. G. Rodewald, and T. S. Schulenberg. Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/home

…or, if you need to go with a more standard author/date format:

S. M. Billerman, B. K. Keeney, P. G. Rodewald, and T. S. Schulenberg (Editors) (2022). Birds of the World. Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/home

To cite earlier versions of accounts:

To cite earlier versions of BOW species accounts, including accounts from associated projects (HBW Alive, Birds of North America, and Neotropical Birds), go the Revision History page associated with each individual account. There you will find the recommended citation for each prior version of the account along with a URL link to that resource.

Understanding reference styles

You might notice there is a combination of reference styles in BOW. As with several other aspects of this project, some background might help clarify why this occurs. Each source project in BOW had its own way of handling references in the past, including differences in style and in scope. When this source content was merged together into BOW, there was no easy way to upgrade the varying reference styles to match a certain standard. As a result, reference styles are inconsistent for the short-term. Moving forward, our authors and editors are updating references into the modern numeric style.