How to format your references using the General Relativity and Gravitation citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for General Relativity and Gravitation. 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

Kealey, T.: More is less. Economists and governments lag decades behind Derek Price’s thinking. Nature. 405, 279 (2000)

A journal article with 2 authors

Ratnieks, F.L.W., Wenseleers, T.: Evolution. Policing insect societies. Science. 307, 54–56 (2005)

A journal article with 3 authors

Wu, B., Ooi, T.L., He, Z.J.: Perceiving distance accurately by a directional process of integrating ground information. Nature. 428, 73–77 (2004)

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Houde, M., Bertholet, S., Gagnon, E., Brunet, S., Goyette, G., Laplante, A., Princiotta, M.F., Thibault, P., Sacks, D., Desjardins, M.: Phagosomes are competent organelles for antigen cross-presentation. Nature. 425, 402–406 (2003)

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Tms: TMS 2014 Supplemental Proceedings. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ (2014)

An edited book

Okonkwo, B. ed: Christian Ethics and Corporate Culture: A Critical View on Corporate Responsibilities. Springer International Publishing, Cham (2014)

A chapter in an edited book

Delahay, J.N., Lauerman, W.C.: Children’s Orthopedics. In: Wiesel, S.W. and Delahay, J.N. (eds.) Essentials of Orthopedic Surgery. pp. 173–251. Springer, New York, NY (2011)

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 General Relativity and Gravitation.

Blog post

Fang, J.: Mysterious Plumes On Mars Baffle Astronomers, https://www.iflscience.com/space/massive-martian-plumes-remain-mystery/

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: Software Tools and Techniques. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (1985)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Parsons, J.R.: Throwing a wrench in the translational machinery: Discovery of RNA ligands by fluorescence techniques, (2010)

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

Powell, M.: Two Teams Diverge on a Common Path, (2017)

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1, 2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	General Relativity and Gravitation
Abbreviation	Gen. Relativ. Gravit.
ISSN (print)	0001-7701
ISSN (online)	1572-9532
Scope	Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)