How to format your references using the Earth and Planetary Science Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 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

Pearson, P.N., 2010. Paleoclimate. Increased atmospheric CO₂ during the Middle Eocene. Science 330, 763–764.

A journal article with 2 authors

Parker, A.R., Lawrence, C.R., 2001. Water capture by a desert beetle. Nature 414, 33–34.

A journal article with 3 authors

Nandal, P., Ravella, S.R., Kuhad, R.C., 2013. Laccase production by Coriolopsis caperata RCK2011: optimization under solid state fermentation by Taguchi DOE methodology. Sci. Rep. 3, 1386.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Ressler, K.J., Mercer, K.B., Bradley, B., Jovanovic, T., Mahan, A., Kerley, K., Norrholm, S.D., Kilaru, V., Smith, A.K., Myers, A.J., Ramirez, M., Engel, A., Hammack, S.E., Toufexis, D., Braas, K.M., Binder, E.B., May, V., 2011. Post-traumatic stress disorder is associated with PACAP and the PAC1 receptor. Nature 470, 492–497.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

MacClancy, J., 2013. Anthropology in the Public Arena. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Boettcher, L., 2016. Development and Learning of Young Children with Disabilities: A Vygotskian Perspective, International Perspectives on Early Childhood Education and Development. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Dührkop, K., Ludwig, M., Meusel, M., Böcker, S., 2013. Faster Mass Decomposition, in: Darling, A., Stoye, J. (Eds.), Algorithms in Bioinformatics: 13th International Workshop, WABI 2013, Sophia Antipolis, France, September 2-4, 2013. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 45–58.

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 Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Blog post

Andrew, D., 2016. Don’t Shoot The Messenger: How RNA Could Keep Us Young [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/dont-shoot-the-messenger-how-rna-could-keep-us-young/ (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, 1995. Information Technology Investment: A Governmentwide Overview (No. AIMD-95-208). 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

Brown, L.T., 2009. Identifying potential co-repressors associated with dexamethasone-induced repression of the MUC5AC gene (Doctoral dissertation). George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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

Hollander, S., 2002. Colleges Like Sarah Lawrence Are Putting Poets in Motion. New York Times D1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Pearson, 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Parker and Lawrence, 2001; Pearson, 2010).

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

Two authors: (Parker and Lawrence, 2001)
Three or more authors: (Ressler et al., 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	Earth and Planetary Science Letters
Abbreviation	Earth Planet. Sci. Lett.
ISSN (print)	0012-821X
Scope	Earth and Planetary Sciences (miscellaneous) Geochemistry and Petrology Geophysics Space and Planetary Science