How to format your references using the Acta Geochimica citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Acta Geochimica. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX syles 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
Abbott A (2003) Membrane proteins: channel voyager makes waves. Nature 426:755
A journal article with 2 authors
Hartland GV, Lo SS (2013) Physics. Spectroscopy beyond the single-particle limit. Science 341:36–37
A journal article with 3 authors
André P, Ward-Thompson D, Greaves J (2012) Interferometric identification of a pre-brown dwarf. Science 337:69–72
A journal article with 5 or more authors
Ahn BY, Duoss EB, Motala MJ, et al (2009) Omnidirectional printing of flexible, stretchable, and spanning silver microelectrodes. Science 323:1590–1593

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Hornberger G, Wiberg P (2005) Numerical Methods in the Hydrological Sciences. American Geophysical Union, Washington D. C.
An edited book
Kaski P (2006) Classification Algorithms for Codes and Designs. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
A chapter in an edited book
Battiti R, Mascia F, Brunato M (2009) Reacting on the Objective Function. In: Brunato M, Mascia F (eds) Reactive Search and Intelligent Optimization. Springer US, Boston, MA, pp 1–9

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 Acta Geochimica.

Blog post
Hale T (2015) NASA Release Report On The Orbital ATK Antares Rocket Crash Last Year. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/nasa-release-report-orbital-atk-antares-rocket-crash-last-year/. 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 (1977) The Federal Wind Energy Program. 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
Yi M (2015) Interrater reliability between novice and expert functional movement screen raters. Doctoral dissertation, 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
Haberman M, Mazzetti M, Apuzzo M (2017) Kushner is Said to Have Mulled Russia Channel. 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 (Abbott 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Abbott 2003; Hartland and Lo 2013).

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

  • Two authors: (Hartland and Lo 2013)
  • Three or more authors: (Ahn et al. 2009)

About the journal

Full journal titleActa Geochimica
AbbreviationActa Geochim.
ISSN (print)2096-0956
ISSN (online)2365-7499
ScopeGeochemistry and Petrology

Other styles