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

Montgomery M R 2008 The urban transformation of the developing world Science 319 761–4

A journal article with 2 authors

Digicaylioglu M and Lipton S A 2001 Erythropoietin-mediated neuroprotection involves cross-talk between Jak2 and NF-kappaB signalling cascades Nature 412 641–7

A journal article with 3 authors

Atallah B V, Scanziani M and Carandini M 2014 Atallah et al. reply Nature 508 E3

A journal article with 99 or more authors

Baublitz M, Lane C, Lin H, Hafiz H, Markiewicz R S, Barbiellini B, Sun Z, Dessau D S and Bansil A 2014 A Minimal tight-binding model for ferromagnetic canted bilayer manganites Sci. Rep. 4 7512

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Martinsen U 2017 Kostenrechnung in der Bauwirtschaft (Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA)

An edited book

Hinze M 2009 Optimization with PDE Constraints vol 23, ed R Pinnau, M Ulbrich and S Ulbrich (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands)

A chapter in an edited book

Kunz M, Fuchs L, Netter M and Pernul G 2015 How to Discover High-Quality Roles? A Survey and Dependency Analysis of Quality Criteria in Role Mining Information Systems Security and Privacy: First International Conference, ICISSP 2015, Angers, France, February 9-11, 2015, Revised Selected Papers Communications in Computer and Information Science ed O Camp, E Weippl, C Bidan and E Aïmeur (Cham: Springer International Publishing) pp 49–67

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

Fang J 2014 Bats Navigate in 3D Using a Donut-Shaped Compass in Their Brain IFLScience Online: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/bats-navigate-3d-using-donut-shaped-compass-their-brain/

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 Highway Trust Fund: DOT Has Opportunities to Improve Tracking and Reporting of Highway Spending (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

Hernandez R 2013 Growth and development of greenhouse vegetable seedlings under supplemental LED lighting Doctoral dissertation (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona)

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

Leland J 2016 Mystery Ends: Date and Venue Are Set for Chess Event New York Times A17

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Montgomery 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Montgomery 2008, Digicaylioglu and Lipton 2001).

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

Two authors: (Digicaylioglu and Lipton 2001)
Three or more authors: (Baublitz et al 2014)

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