Citing EOL

These citations use slight modifications of Turabian Scientific Style, as formatted by The University of Chicago Press.

To cite the EOL site as a whole:

Encyclopedia of Life. Available from http://www.eol.org. Accessed 15 Jan 2016.

To cite the EOL concept:

Parr, C. S., N. Wilson, P. Leary, K. S. Schulz, K. Lans, L. Walley, J. A. Hammock, A. Goddard, J. Rice, M. Studer, J. T. G. Holmes, and R. J. Corrigan, Jr. 2014. The Encyclopedia of Life v2: Providing Global Access to Knowledge About Life on Earth.  Biodiversity Data Journal 2: e1079, doi:10.3897/BDJ.2.e1079

To cite an EOL article:

As with most web pages, EOL pages change over time, and different versions of EOL pages are not archived. Therefore, you should only cite individual articles (see above) rather than an entire EOL page. We recommend you only cite information that has been trusted. Article versions are archived with a distinct URL, but some articles may be removed, and EOL does not guarantee permanency of data object URLs.

Once you have located the article you want to cite, click on Learn More about this Article to see if the provider of the object has a suggested citation. Alternatively, you can build a citation using the information provided on the article's page. Include the author, the year of the latest revision (under Revisions in the right sidebar), the taxon name and the object title, the original source, the date you viewed it, and EOL data object URL, e.g.:

Hughey, M. 2011. "Hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni: Life History."  In Amphibians of Panama. Accessed 15 Jan 2014, available from Encyclopedia of Life, http://eol.org/data_objects/12682919

To cite data downloaded from EOL:

If you use EOL as a data source for a scientific paper, please be sure to cite the original source of the data and any references that are provided to support individual values.  For most data records, citations and references will be included in the data download file, or you can access them along with other metadata by clicking on the data record in the Data tab of the EOL taxon page. For example, if you used this wood density value for Zanha africana, you would want to include the following citations in your list of references:

Chave J, Coomes D, Jansen S, Lewis SL, Swenson NG, Zanne AE (2009) Towards a worldwide wood economics spectrum. Ecology Letters 12: 351-366. doi:10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01285.x

Goldsmith, B. and D.T. Carter. 1981. The indigenous timbers of Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwe Bulletin of Forestry Research No. 9:x, 406 pp.

Citing EOL as the data supplier is appreciated but not required..