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

Macilwain, C., 2000. US energy agency pulls plug on role in genome project. Nature 404, 4.

A journal article with 2 authors

Carter, R.M., Gammon, P., 2004. New Zealand maritime glaciation: millennial-scale southern climate change since 3.9 Ma. Science 304, 1659–1662.

A journal article with 3 authors

Pergams, O.R.W., Barnes, W.M., Nyberg, D., 2003. Mammalian microevolution: Rapid change in mouse mitochondrial DNA. Nature 423, 397.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Diplas, P., Dancey, C.L., Celik, A.O., Valyrakis, M., Greer, K., Akar, T., 2008. The role of impulse on the initiation of particle movement under turbulent flow conditions. Science 322, 717–720.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Douglas, J., Noy, E.A., 2010. Building Surveys and Reports. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK.

An edited book

Cazals, F., Kornprobst, P. (Eds.), 2013. Modeling in Computational Biology and Biomedicine: A Multidisciplinary Endeavor. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Nikodem, M., Bawiec, M.A., Surmacz, T.R., 2010. Negative Difference Resistance and Its Application to Construct Boolean Logic Circuits, in: Kwiecień, A., Gaj, P., Stera, P. (Eds.), Computer Networks: 17th Conference, CN 2010, Ustroń, Poland, June 15-19, 2010. Proceedings, Communications in Computer and Information Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 39–48.

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

Andrews, R., 2016. Scientists Have Figured Out What Caused The “Alien Radio Signal” Coming From A Distant Exoplanet [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/space/alien-radio-signal-distant-exoplanet-caused-planet-wide-lightning-storm/ (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, 1996. Information Technology: Streamlining FHA’s Single Family Housing Operations (No. AIMD-97-4). 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

Warner, T., 2015. California Assembly Bill 2404 Fair Play in Community Sports Act compliance procedures manual (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Dominus, S., 2016. Trump’s Boasts Shake Women Out of Silence. 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 (Macilwain, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Carter and Gammon, 2004; Macilwain, 2000).

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

Two authors: (Carter and Gammon, 2004)
Three or more authors: (Diplas et al., 2008)

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

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