How to format your references using the Environment Systems and Decisions citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Environment Systems and Decisions. 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.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
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
Schneider S (2009) The worst-case scenario. Nature 458:1104–1105
A journal article with 2 authors
Finkelstein A, Taubman S (2015) Health care policy. Randomize evaluations to improve health care delivery. Science 347:720–722
A journal article with 3 authors
Scott BA, Avidan MS, Crowder CM (2002) Regulation of hypoxic death in C. elegans by the insulin/IGF receptor homolog DAF-2. Science 296:2388–2391
A journal article with 5 or more authors
He W, Huang K, Ning N, et al (2014) Enabling an integrated rate-temporal learning scheme on memristor. Sci Rep 4:4755

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Wilson D (2012) Visual Guide to Financial Markets. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ
An edited book
Cavalcanti A, Dams DR (eds) (2009) FM 2009: Formal Methods: Second World Congress, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, November 2-6, 2009. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
A chapter in an edited book
Pöschl C, Scherzer O (2015) Distance Measures and Applications to Multimodal Variational Imaging. In: Scherzer O (ed) Handbook of Mathematical Methods in Imaging. Springer, New York, NY, pp 125–155

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 Environment Systems and Decisions.

Blog post
Taub B (2016) Hammerhead Sharks Swim On Their Side Nearly All The Time. In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 2018

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 (2014) Explosives Detection Canines: TSA Has Taken Steps to Analyze Canine Team Data and Assess the Effectiveness of Passenger Screening Canines. 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
Kantar L (2010) Clinical judgment among new nursing graduates: A multiple-case study. Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix

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
Gimenez S (2011) When a Decision Letter Is From Mom’s Alma Mater. New York Times A15

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Schneider 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Schneider 2009; Finkelstein and Taubman 2015).

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

  • Two authors: (Finkelstein and Taubman 2015)
  • Three or more authors: (He et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleEnvironment Systems and Decisions
AbbreviationEnviron. Syst. Decis.
ISSN (print)2194-5403
ISSN (online)2194-5411
ScopeGeneral Environmental Science

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