How to format your references using the Earth and Planetary Science Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 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

Schmittner, A., 2005. Decline of the marine ecosystem caused by a reduction in the Atlantic overturning circulation. Nature 434, 628–633.

A journal article with 2 authors

Steig, E.J., Wolfe, A.P., 2008. Atmospheric science. Sprucing up Greenland. Science 320, 1595–1596.

A journal article with 3 authors

Long, S.B., Casey, P.J., Beese, L.S., 2002. Reaction path of protein farnesyltransferase at atomic resolution. Nature 419, 645–650.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Krumholz, A., Shcherbakova, D.M., Xia, J., Wang, L.V., Verkhusha, V.V., 2014. Multicontrast photoacoustic in vivo imaging using near-infrared fluorescent proteins. Sci. Rep. 4, 3939.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

King, A.M., 2011. Internal Control of Fixed Assets. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Woodin, M.A., Maffei, A. (Eds.), 2011. Inhibitory Synaptic Plasticity, 1st ed. Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

Choi, I., Kim, D., 2012. Multi-scale Integral Modified Census Transform for Eye Detection, in: Bebis, G., Boyle, R., Parvin, B., Koracin, D., Fowlkes, C., Wang, S., Choi, M.-H., Mantler, S., Schulze, J., Acevedo, D., Mueller, K., Papka, M. (Eds.), Advances in Visual Computing: 8th International Symposium, ISVC 2012, Rethymnon, Crete, Greece, July 16-18, 2012, Revised Selected Papers, Part II, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 41–50.

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 Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2014. 10 Science Facts We Still Get Wrong [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/environment/10-science-facts-we-still-get-wrong/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1989. Aviation Safety: Information on FAA’s Age 60 Rule for Pilots (No. RCED-90-45FS). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Kelly, J.C., 2012. The fluid evolution of the Mount Mica and Irish Pit pegmatites, Maine: Evidence from stable isotopes (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Davey, M., Walsh, M.W., 2013. Billions in Debt, Detroit Tumbles Into Insolvency. New York Times A1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Schmittner, 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Schmittner, 2005; Steig and Wolfe, 2008).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Steig and Wolfe, 2008)
Three or more authors: (Krumholz et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Earth and Planetary Science Letters
Abbreviation	Earth Planet. Sci. Lett.
ISSN (print)	0012-821X
Scope	Earth and Planetary Sciences (miscellaneous) Geochemistry and Petrology Geophysics Space and Planetary Science