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

Draaisma, D., 2001, The tracks of thought: Nature, v. 414, p. 153.

A journal article with 2 authors

Rashid, H., and Boyle, E.A., 2007, Mixed-layer deepening during Heinrich events: a multi-planktonic foraminiferal delta18O approach: Science (New York, N.Y.), v. 318, p. 439–441.

A journal article with 3 authors

Hulleman, F., van Kerkwijk, M.H., and Kulkarni, S.R., 2000, An optical counterpart to the anomalous X-ray pulsar 4U0142+61: Nature, v. 408, p. 689–692.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Wahlund, J.-E. et al., 2018, In situ measurements of Saturn’s ionosphere show that it is dynamic and interacts with the rings: Science (New York, N.Y.), v. 359, p. 66–68.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Lavagnini, I., Magno, F., Seraglia, R., and Traldi, P., 2006, Quantitative Applications of Mass Spectrometry: Chichester, UK, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Chaudron, M.R.V. (Ed.), 2009, Models in Software Engineering: Workshops and Symposia at MODELS 2008, Toulouse, France, September 28 - October 3, 2008. Reports and Revised Selected Papers: Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, v. 5421, XI, 404 p p.

A chapter in an edited book

Huneman, P., 2015, Selection, in Heams, T., Huneman, P., Lecointre, G., and Silberstein, M. eds., Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences, Dordrecht, Springer Netherlands, p. 37–76.

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

O`Callaghan, J., 2017, Astronomers Have Found New Evidence That We Live In A Void: IFLScience, https://www.iflscience.com/space/astronomers-have-found-new-evidence-that-we-live-in-a-void/ (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, NSF Review: Review Process for the National Science Foundation’s Science and Engineering Pipeline Study: U.S. Government Printing Office T-RCED-92-24.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Soma, V.M., 2016, A particle filter methodology for salient object detection in videos [Doctoral dissertation]: California State University, Long Beach.

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

Hodara, S., 2016, Affordability in a Bucolic Setting: New York Times, p. RE17.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Draaisma, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Draaisma, 2001; Rashid and Boyle, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Rashid and Boyle, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Wahlund et al., 2018)

About the journal

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

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