How to format your references using the Acta Astronautica citation style

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

[1]

M. Heimann, Climate change. How stable is the methane cycle?, Science 327 (2010) 1211–1212.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

D.G. Russell, C.F. Nathan, Perspective: Graduation time, Nature 502 (2013) S7.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

S.P. Green, C. Jones, A. Stasch, Stable magnesium(I) compounds with Mg-Mg bonds, Science 318 (2007) 1754–1757.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

J. Zhao, L. Wang, Y. Wang, X. Weng, S. Li, Y. Jiang, Developmental tuning of reflexive attentional effect to biological motion cues, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 5558.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

A.H. Eden, Codecharts, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2011.

An edited book

[1]

N. Hilber, Computational Methods for Quantitative Finance: Finite Element Methods for Derivative Pricing, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

J. Leveling, D. Zhou, G.J.F. Jones, V. Wade, Document Expansion, Query Translation and Language Modeling for Ad-Hoc IR, in: C. Peters, G.M.D. Nunzio, M. Kurimo, T. Mandl, D. Mostefa, A. Peñas, G. Roda (Eds.), Multilingual Information Access Evaluation I. Text Retrieval Experiments: 10th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2009, Corfu, Greece, September 30 - October 2, 2009, Revised Selected Papers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010: pp. 58–61.

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 Acta Astronautica.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, GM Crop Ban: How Scottish Salmon – And Public Health – Could Have Benefited From This Technology, IFLScience (2015). https://www.iflscience.com/environment/gm-crop-ban-how-scottish-salmon-and-public-health-could-have-benefited-technology/ (accessed October 30, 2018).

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, NASA Aeronautics: Efforts to Preserve U.S. Leadership in the Aeronautics Industry Are Limited, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1992.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

J.M. Israel, Student Extracurricular Participation, Student Achievement, and School Perception: an Elementary School Perspective, Doctoral dissertation, Lindenwood University, 2013.

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

[1]

J. Mahler, N. Confessore, Puerto Rico’s Pricey Struggle, New York Times (2015) A1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Acta Astronautica
Abbreviation	Acta Astronaut.
ISSN (print)	0094-5765
Scope