How to format your references using the Transportation Research Part A citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Transportation Research Part A. 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

Narbonne, G.M., 2010. Geochemistry. Ocean chemistry and early animals. Science 328, 53–54.

A journal article with 2 authors

Fehr, E., Fischbacher, U., 2003. The nature of human altruism. Nature 425, 785–791.

A journal article with 3 authors

Ryckman, J.D., Jiao, Y., Weiss, S.M., 2013. Three-dimensional patterning and morphological control of porous nanomaterials by gray-scale direct imprinting. Sci. Rep. 3, 1502.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Martin, A., Troadec, C., Boualem, A., Rajab, M., Fernandez, R., Morin, H., Pitrat, M., Dogimont, C., Bendahmane, A., 2009. A transposon-induced epigenetic change leads to sex determination in melon. Nature 461, 1135–1138.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Mason, R.P., 2013. Trace Metals in Aquatic Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Kitsos, C.P., Oliveira, T.A., Rigas, A., Gulati, S. (Eds.), 2015. Theory and Practice of Risk Assessment: ICRA 5, Tomar, Portugal, 2013, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Andresen, S., Gerarts, K., 2014. Reconstructing Children’s Concepts: Some Theoretical Ideas and Empirical Findings on Education and the Good Life, in: Stoecklin, D., Bonvin, J.-M. (Eds.), Children’s Rights and the Capability Approach: Challenges and Prospects, Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp. 85–107.

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 Transportation Research Part A.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2015. Real Crisis In Psychology Isn’t That Studies Don’t Replicate, But That We Usually Don’t Even Try [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (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, 1973. Minicomputers (No. 090927). 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

Henry, M.E., 2009. A nutrition education program to change college dorm dwellers’ eating patterns (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

Hodara, S., 2015. A Show Meant to Provoke Double Takes. New York Times WE8.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Narbonne, 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Fehr and Fischbacher, 2003; Narbonne, 2010).

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

Two authors: (Fehr and Fischbacher, 2003)
Three or more authors: (Martin et al., 2009)

About the journal

Full journal title	Transportation Research Part A
Abbreviation	Transp. Res. Part A Policy Pract.
ISSN (print)	0965-8564
Scope	Management Science and Operations Research Civil and Structural Engineering Transportation