How to format your references using the Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. 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 references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX 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

Fung I: Atmospheric science. A hyperventilating biosphere. Science 2013, 341:1075–1076.

A journal article with 2 authors

Chameides WL, Bergin M: Climate change. Soot takes center stage. Science 2002, 297:2214–2215.

A journal article with 3 authors

Mehta MR, Lee AK, Wilson MA: Role of experience and oscillations in transforming a rate code into a temporal code. Nature 2002, 417:741–746.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Maldonado AM, Doerner P, Dixon RA, Lamb CJ, Cameron RK: A putative lipid transfer protein involved in systemic resistance signalling in Arabidopsis. Nature 2002, 419:399–403.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Harrington PJ: Pharmaceutical Process Chemistry for Synthesis. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2010.

An edited book

Fine B: Number Theory: An Introduction via the Distribution of Primes. Birkhäuser; 2007.

A chapter in an edited book

Wallgrün JO: Voronoi Graph Matching for Robot Localization and Mapping. In Transactions on Computational Science IX: Special Issue on Voronoi Diagrams in Science and Engineering. Edited by Gavrilova ML, Tan CJK, Anton F. Springer; 2010:76–108.

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 Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability.

Blog post

Andrew E: Can A Virtual Reality Game Make You Forget You’re In Pain? IFLScience 2015,

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: Composite Health Care System: Outpatient Capability Is Nearly Ready for Worldwide Deployment. U.S. Government Printing Office; 1992.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Garapati SH: Analytical and Numerical Modeling of Assembly Procedures of Steel Fulcra of Bascule Bridges. 2013,

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

Coscarelli J, Sisario B: Prince’s Estate Sues Over a New EP. New York Times 2017,

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability
Abbreviation	Curr. Opin. Environ. Sustain.
ISSN (print)	1877-3435
Scope	General Environmental Science General Social Sciences

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