How to format your references using the Geoscience Letters citation style

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

Prusiner SB (2012) Cell biology. A unifying role for prions in neurodegenerative diseases. Science 336:1511–1513

A journal article with 2 authors

Levine AJ, Puzio-Kuter AM (2010) The control of the metabolic switch in cancers by oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. Science 330:1340–1344

A journal article with 3 authors

Csankovszki G, McDonel P, Meyer BJ (2004) Recruitment and spreading of the C. elegans dosage compensation complex along X chromosomes. Science 303:1182–1185

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Zhu Q, Sun Y, Yun X, et al (2014) Antinociceptive effects of curcumin in a rat model of postoperative pain. Sci Rep 4:4932

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

McGrath AE (2011) Luther’s Theology of the Cross. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK

An edited book

Meiselwitz G (ed) (2016) Social Computing and Social Media: 8th International Conference, SCSM 2016, Held as Part of HCI International 2016, Toronto, ON, Canada, July 17–22, 2016. Proceedings. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Dabringer C, Eder J (2016) Towards Adaptive Distributed Top-k Query Processing. In: Ivanović M, Thalheim B, Catania B, et al. (eds) New Trends in Databases and Information Systems: ADBIS 2016 Short Papers and Workshops, BigDap, DCSA, DC, Prague, Czech Republic, August 28-31, 2016, Proceedings. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 37–44

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 Geoscience Letters.

Blog post

Andrew E (2016) Kennewick Man Will Be Reburied, But Quandaries Around Human Remains Won’t. In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 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

Government Accountability Office (2008) Native Hawaiian Education Act: Greater Oversight Would Increase Accountability and Enable Targeting of Funds to Areas with Greatest Need. 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

Sikorsky AA (2014) Concentration enhancement and device fabrication for the improved performance of gradient elution moving boundary electrophoresis. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park

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

Johnson G (2015) When Radiation Isn’t the Risk. New York Times D3

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Prusiner 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Levine and Puzio-Kuter 2010; Prusiner 2012).

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

Two authors: (Levine and Puzio-Kuter 2010)
Three or more authors: (Zhu et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Geoscience Letters
Abbreviation	Geosci. Lett.
ISSN (online)	2196-4092
Scope