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

Brody, H., 2011. Hepatitis C. Nature 474, S1.

A journal article with 2 authors

Morrison, S.J., Scadden, D.T., 2014. The bone marrow niche for haematopoietic stem cells. Nature 505, 327–334.

A journal article with 3 authors

Martill, D.M., Tischlinger, H., Longrich, N.R., 2015. EVOLUTION. A four-legged snake from the Early Cretaceous of Gondwana. Science 349, 416–419.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Du, S., Lin, K., Malladi, S.K., Lu, Y., Sun, S., Xu, Q., Steinberger-Wilckens, R., Dong, H., 2014. Plasma nitriding induced growth of Pt-nanowire arrays as high performance electrocatalysts for fuel cells. Sci. Rep. 4, 6439.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Dubuisson, S., 2015. Tracking with Particle Filter for High-Dimensional Observation and State Spaces. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Brueckner, S.A., Marzo Serugendo, G.D., Karageorgos, A., Nagpal, R. (Eds.), 2005. Engineering Self-Organising Systems: Methodologies and Applications, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Gahbiche, S., Pernelle, N., Saïs, F., 2012. Explaining Reference Reconciliation Decisions: A Coloured Petri Nets Based Approach, in: Guillet, F., Ritschard, G., Zighed, D.A. (Eds.), Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Management: Volume 2, Studies in Computational Intelligence. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 63–81.

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

Davis, J., 2016. Ancestor Of HIV Is At Least 60 Million Years Old [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/ancestor-of-hiv-is-at-least-60-million-years-old/ (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, 1975. Denial of Protest Involving Solicitation’s Evaluation Standard (No. B-181165). 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

Bailey, S.M., 2008. Content Assessment in Intelligent Computer-Aided Language Learning: Meaning Error Diagnosis for English as a Second Language (Doctoral dissertation). Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.

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

Walsh, M.W., 2016. Pension System Move May Squeeze Taxpayers. New York Times B1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Brody, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Brody, 2011; Morrison and Scadden, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Morrison and Scadden, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Du et al., 2014)

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