How to format your references using the City citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for City. 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.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
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
Nowak, Martin A. 2015. “John Forbes Nash (1928-2015).” Nature 522 (7557): 420.
A journal article with 2 authors
Sawa, Akira, and Solomon H. Snyder. 2002. “Schizophrenia: Diverse Approaches to a Complex Disease.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 296 (5568): 692–695.
A journal article with 3 authors
Xiong, Qiaojie, Petr Znamenskiy, and Anthony M. Zador. 2015. “Selective Corticostriatal Plasticity during Acquisition of an Auditory Discrimination Task.” Nature 521 (7552): 348–351.
A journal article with 11 or more authors
Thomson, M. C., F. J. Doblas-Reyes, S. J. Mason, R. Hagedorn, S. J. Connor, T. Phindela, A. P. Morse, and T. N. Palmer. 2006. “Malaria Early Warnings Based on Seasonal Climate Forecasts from Multi-Model Ensembles.” Nature 439 (7076): 576–579.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Mattu, Amal, Shamai A. Grossman, and Peter L. Rosen. 2016. Geriatric Emergencies. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An edited book
Perner, Petra, ed. 2015. Advances in Data Mining: Applications and Theoretical Aspects: 15th Industrial Conference, ICDM 2015, Hamburg, Germany, July 11-24, 2015, Proceedings. Vol. 9165. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
A chapter in an edited book
Neri, Emanuele, and Silvio Mazziotti. 2012. “Altre Applicazioni Della TC Dentascan.” In Il Dentascan, edited by Silvio Mazziotti, 33–43. Springer ABC. Milano: Springer.

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 City.

Blog post
Andrew, Elise. 2014. “Previous Sexual Partner’s Semen Can Influence Another Fly’s Offspring.” IFLScience. IFLScience.

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. 2001. National Laboratories: Better Performance Reporting Could Aid Oversight of Laboratory-Directed R&D Program. GAO-01-927. 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
Randall, Sarah L. 2010. “Psychologists’ Use of, Familiarity, and Comfort with Alcoholics Anonymous Slogans in Psychotherapy.” Doctoral dissertation, Malibu, CA: Pepperdine University.

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
Shpigel, Ben. 2017. “A Familiar Ring.” New York Times, February 6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Nowak 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Nowak 2015; Sawa and Snyder 2002).

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

  • Two authors: (Sawa and Snyder 2002)
  • Three authors: (Xiong, Znamenskiy, and Zador 2015)
  • 4 or more authors: (Thomson et al. 2006)

About the journal

Full journal titleCity
AbbreviationCity
ISSN (print)1360-4813
ISSN (online)1470-3629
ScopeGeography, Planning and Development
Urban Studies

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