How to format your references using the Environmental Research Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Environmental Research 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Koen D 2003 Nuts and bolts Nature 426 104

A journal article with 2 authors

van Putten M H P M and Levinson A 2002 Detecting energy emissions from a rotating black hole Science 295 1874–7

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang K, Zhang Y and Wang S 2013 Enhancing thermoelectric properties of organic composites through hierarchical nanostructures Sci. Rep. 3 3448

A journal article with 99 or more authors

D’Angelo M A, Anderson D J, Richard E and Hetzer M W 2006 Nuclear pores form de novo from both sides of the nuclear envelope Science 312 440–3

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bradford R 2015 Is Shakespeare Any Good? (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

Yan X-T, Jiang C and Eynard B 2008 Advanced Design and Manufacture to Gain a Competitive Edge: New Manufacturing Techniques and their Role in Improving Enterprise Performance (London: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

Öchsner A and Öchsner M 2016 Timoshenko Beams The Finite Element Analysis Program MSC Marc/Mentat: A First Introduction ed M Öchsner (Singapore: Springer) pp 57–65

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 Environmental Research Letters.

Blog post

Andrew E 2015 Why Menthol Chills Your Mouth When It’s Not Actually Cold IFLScience Online: https://www.iflscience.com/brain/why-menthol-chills-your-mouth-when-it-s-not-actually-cold/

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 2011 Space Acquisitions: DOD Delivering New Generations of Satellites, but Space System Acquisition Challenges Remain (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Walker N A 2010 Mothers’ description of raising two children with an autism spectrum disorder: A case study Doctoral dissertation (Minneapolis, MN: Capella University)

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

Koblin J 2017 Into the Fray of Great TV 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 (Koen 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Koen 2003, van Putten and Levinson 2002).

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

Two authors: (van Putten and Levinson 2002)
Three or more authors: (D’Angelo et al 2006)

About the journal

Full journal title	Environmental Research Letters
Abbreviation	Environ. Res. Lett.
ISSN (online)	1748-9326
Scope	Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment General Environmental Science Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health