How to format your references using the Geology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Geology. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Turk-Browne, N.B., 2013, Functional interactions as big data in the human brain: Science (New York, N.Y.), v. 342, p. 580–584.
A journal article with 2 authors
Sansom, R.S., and Wills, M.A., 2013, Fossilization causes organisms to appear erroneously primitive by distorting evolutionary trees: Scientific reports, v. 3, p. 2545.
A journal article with 3 authors
Moree, M., Ewart, S., and Diggs, C., 2004, Strength in unity: Nature, v. 430, p. 938–939.
A journal article with 11 or more authors
Hinkov, V., Haug, D., Fauqué, B., Bourges, P., Sidis, Y., Ivanov, A., Bernhard, C., Lin, C.T., and Keimer, B., 2008, Electronic liquid crystal state in the high-temperature superconductor YBa2Cu3O6.45: Science (New York, N.Y.), v. 319, p. 597–600.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Reid, R., Fraser-King, G., and Schwaderer, W.D., 2006, Data Lifecycles: Chichester, UK, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An edited book
Astudillo, L., 2014, Chemical Optimization Algorithm for Fuzzy Controller Design (P. Melin & O. Castillo, Eds.): Cham, Springer International Publishing, SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology, VIII, 77 p. 32 illus p.
A chapter in an edited book
Amarouche, I.A., Benslimane, D., Barhamgi, M., Mrissa, M., and Alimazighi, Z., 2011, Electronic Health Record Data-as-a-Services Composition Based on Query Rewriting, in Hameurlain, A., Küng, J., Wagner, R., Böhm, C., Eder, J., and Plant, C. eds., Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems IV: Special Issue on Database Systems for Biomedical Applications, Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, p. 95–123.

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 Geology.

Blog post
Luntz, S., 2017, Ancient Monkey Blood Found Fossilized In Amber: IFLScience, https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/ancient-monkey-blood-found-fossilized-in-amber/ (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, 2008, Surface Transportation: Preliminary Observations on Efforts to Restructure Current Program: U.S. Government Printing Office GAO-08-478T.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
Schneider, S.Z., 2009, Mercury sources and cycling processes in the Cape Fear River estuary, North Carolina [Doctoral dissertation]: University of North Carolina.

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
Vecsey, G., 2010, For Mets, Gloom and Doom Instead of Sunshine and Smiles: New York Times, p. SP7.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Turk-Browne, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Sansom and Wills, 2013; Turk-Browne, 2013).

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

  • Two authors: (Sansom and Wills, 2013)
  • Three or more authors: (Hinkov et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal titleGeology
AbbreviationGeology
ISSN (print)0091-7613
ISSN (online)1943-2682
ScopeGeology

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