How to format your references using the AIMS Geosciences citation style

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

Macilwain C (2011) Pharmaceutical industry must take its medicine. Nature 470: 141.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kanan MW, Nocera DG (2008) In situ formation of an oxygen-evolving catalyst in neutral water containing phosphate and Co2+. Science 321: 1072–1075.

A journal article with 3 authors

McGraw CM, Samaco RC, Zoghbi HY (2011) Adult neural function requires MeCP2. Science 333: 186.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Yamamoto E, Akimoto T, Yasui M, et al. (2014) Origin of subdiffusion of water molecules on cell membrane surfaces. Sci Rep 4: 4720.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Wen S, Huang P (2011) Principles of Tribology, Singapore, John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte Ltd.

An edited book

Zhuang FG, Li JC (Eds.) (2009) New Trends in Fluid Mechanics Research: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Fluid Mechanics (Shanghai, 2007), Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Kharbat F, Odeh M, Bull L (2008) Knowledge Discovery from Medical Data: An Empirical Study with XCS, In: Bull L, Bernadó-Mansilla E, Holmes J (Eds.), Learning Classifier Systems in Data Mining, Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer, 93–121.

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 AIMS Geosciences.

Blog post

Carpineti A (2016) IFLScience, Scientist Have Built A Reprogrammable Quantum Computer, 2016. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/technology/scientist-have-built-a-reprogrammable-quantum-computer/.

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 (1997) The Excepted Service: A Research Profile, Washington, DC, U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Wansapura AN (2010) The role of alpha sodium,potassium-ATPase isoforms in mediating cardiac hypertrophy in response to endogenous cardiotonic steroids.

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

Stewart JB (2017) Profit or Loss. New York Times BR11.

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	AIMS Geosciences
ISSN (online)	2471-2132
Scope