How to format your references using the Geological Society of America Bulletin citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Geological Society of America Bulletin. 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

Barton, R.A., 2002, How did brains evolve? Nature, v. 415, p. 134–135.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gillson, L., and Hoffman, M.T., 2007, Ecology. Rangeland ecology in a changing world: Science (New York, N.Y.), v. 315, p. 53–54.

A journal article with 3 authors

Ishii, H., Sakurai, Y., and Maruyama, T., 2014, Effect of soccer shoe upper on ball behaviour in curve kicks: Scientific reports, v. 4, p. 6067.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Chen, S.-H., Hung, W.-C., Wang, P., Paul, C., and Konstantopoulos, K., 2013, Mesothelin binding to CA125/MUC16 promotes pancreatic cancer cell motility and invasion via MMP-7 activation: Scientific reports, v. 3, p. 1870.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chappell, D., 2008, The JCT Design and Build Contract 2005: Oxford, UK, Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

An edited book

Avramidis, I., 2016, Eurocode-Compliant Seismic Analysis and Design of R/C Buildings: Concepts, Commentary and Worked Examples with Flowcharts (A. Athanatopoulou, K. Morfidis, A. Sextos, & A. Giaralis, Eds.): Cham, Springer International Publishing, Geotechnical, Geological and Earthquake Engineering, v. 38, XIII, 488 p. 205 illus., 38 illus. in color p.

A chapter in an edited book

Mitra, S.K., 2013, Turning Aliens Into Citizens: A “Toolkit” for a Trans-Disciplinary Policy Analysis, in Mitra, S.K. ed., Citizenship as Cultural Flow: Structure, Agency and Power, Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer, Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context, p. 65–84.

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 Geological Society of America Bulletin.

Blog post

Carpineti, A., 2017, Tiny Satellites Discover Biggest Stellar Heartbeat: IFLScience, https://www.iflscience.com/space/tiny-satellites-discover-biggest-stellar-heartbeat/ (accessed October 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, 1992, Air Traffic Control: Advanced Automation System Still Vulnerable to Cost and Schedule Problems: U.S. Government Printing Office RCED-92-264.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Primeaux, S.J., 2014, The Role of Education, Empathy, and Psychological Flexibility in Implicit and Explicit Mental Health Stigma [Doctoral dissertation]: University of Louisiana.

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

Billard, M., 2010, Scouting Report: New York Times, p. E7.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Barton, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Barton, 2002; Gillson and Hoffman, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Gillson and Hoffman, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Chen et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Geological Society of America Bulletin
Abbreviation	Geol. Soc. Am. Bull.
ISSN (print)	0016-7606
Scope	Geology