How to format your references using the Environmental Research Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Environmental Research 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	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

Jayaraman K S 2002 Syngenta ready to drop plans for Indian rice venture Nature 420 596

A journal article with 2 authors

Embley T M and Martin W 2006 Eukaryotic evolution, changes and challenges Nature 440 623–30

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang Y-C, Song S-W and Liu W-M 2014 The confinement induced resonance in spin-orbit coupled cold atoms with Raman coupling Sci. Rep. 4 4992

A journal article with 99 or more authors

Hanna J, Saha K, Pando B, van Zon J, Lengner C J, Creyghton M P, van Oudenaarden A and Jaenisch R 2009 Direct cell reprogramming is a stochastic process amenable to acceleration Nature 462 595–601

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Barron E N 2013 Game Theory (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

Öchsner A and Murch G E 2011 Heat Transfer in Multi-Phase Materials vol 2 (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

Králová-Hromadová I, Juhásová L and Bazsalovicsová E 2016 Intermediate Hosts of Fascioloides magna The Giant Liver Fluke, Fascioloides magna: Past, Present and Future Research SpringerBriefs in Animal Sciences ed Ľ Juhásová and E Bazsalovicsová (Cham: Springer International Publishing) pp 67–79

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 Environmental Research Letters.

Blog post

Fang J 2014 Titan’s Ocean is as Salty as the Dead Sea IFLScience Online: https://www.iflscience.com/space/titan’s-ocean-salty-dead-sea/

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 1988 Competition in the Airline Computerized Reservation System Industry (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

Perez V 2010 Overrepresentation of American Indian youth in foster care: A grant proposal Doctoral dissertation (Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach)

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

Kenigsberg B 2017 In Pursuit of a Social Media Mirage New York Times C10

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Jayaraman 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Jayaraman 2002, Embley and Martin 2006).

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

Two authors: (Embley and Martin 2006)
Three or more authors: (Hanna et al 2009)

About the journal

Full journal title	Environmental Research Letters
Abbreviation	Environ. Res. Lett.
ISSN (online)	1748-9326
Scope	Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment General Environmental Science Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health