How to format your references using the Water Resources Research citation style

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

Jonietz, E. (2011). Designing smarter cancer prevention trials. Nature, 471(7339), S20-1.

A journal article with 2 authors

Bruick, R. K., & McKnight, S. L. (2001). A conserved family of prolyl-4-hydroxylases that modify HIF. Science (New York, N.Y.), 294(5545), 1337–1340.

A journal article with 3 authors

Averill, C., Turner, B. L., & Finzi, A. C. (2014). Mycorrhiza-mediated competition between plants and decomposers drives soil carbon storage. Nature, 505(7484), 543–545.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Kartsev, A., Karlsson, D., Privitera, A., & Verdozzi, C. (2013). Three-dimensional dynamics of a fermionic Mott wedding-cake in clean and disordered optical lattices. Scientific Reports, 3, 2570.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Kaltashov, I. A., & Eyles, S. J. (2005). Mass Spectrometry in Biophysics. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Hawes, J. M., & Glisan, G. B. (Eds.). (2015). Proceedings of the 1987 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Fujimoto, S., Ishikawa, A., Mizuno, T., & Watanabe, T. (2015). Are Firms that Are Awarded More Patents More Productive? In F. Abergel, H. Aoyama, B. K. Chakrabarti, A. Chakraborti, & A. Ghosh (Eds.), Econophysics and Data Driven Modelling of Market Dynamics (pp. 129–142). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Water Resources Research.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014, November 6). The Journey To The Other Side Of Absolute Zero. Retrieved October 30, 2018, from

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). Space Exploration: NASA’s Deep Space Missions Are Experiencing Long Delays (No. NSIAD-88-128BR). 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

Douglas, L. (2014). Thermogravimetric and Raman Investigations on the Mechanism of Decomposition of Lead Compounds on Tungsten Surfaces (Doctoral dissertation). Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL.

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

Sisario, B. (2016, December 14). Bob Krasnow, 82, Executive Who Revived Elektra Records. New York Times, p. A30.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Jonietz, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Bruick & McKnight, 2001; Jonietz, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Bruick & McKnight, 2001)
Three or more authors: (Kartsev et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Water Resources Research
Abbreviation	Water Resour. Res.
ISSN (print)	0043-1397
ISSN (online)	1944-7973
Scope	Water Science and Technology