How to format your references using the Geophysical Research Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Geophysical 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	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

Soden, B. J. (2000). Atmospheric physics. Enlightening water vapour. Nature, 406(6793), 247–248.

A journal article with 2 authors

Thompson, A., & Kanamarlapudi, V. (2014). The regions within the N-terminus critical for human glucagon like peptide-1 receptor (hGLP-1R) cell surface expression. Scientific Reports, 4, 7410.

A journal article with 3 authors

Aguzzi, A., Barres, B. A., & Bennett, M. L. (2013). Microglia: scapegoat, saboteur, or something else? Science (New York, N.Y.), 339(6116), 156–161.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Shendure, J., Porreca, G. J., Reppas, N. B., Lin, X., McCutcheon, J. P., Rosenbaum, A. M., et al. (2005). Accurate multiplex polony sequencing of an evolved bacterial genome. Science (New York, N.Y.), 309(5741), 1728–1732.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Szylar, C. (2013). Risk Management under UCITS III/IV. Hoboken, NJ USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Benson, T. (2016). Principles of Health Interoperability: SNOMED CT, HL7 and FHIR. (G. Grieve, Ed.) (3rd ed. 2016). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Wegner, L. H. (2015). Interplay of Water and Nutrient Transport: A Whole-Plant Perspective. In U. Lüttge & W. Beyschlag (Eds.), Progress in Botany: Vol. 76 (pp. 109–141). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Geophysical Research Letters.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, July 10). Watch Satellites and Space Debris Floating Around Earth in Real Time. Retrieved October 30, 2018, from https://www.iflscience.com/space/watch-satellites-and-space-debris-floating-around-earth-real-time/

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. (2006). Financial Management Systems: Lack of Disciplined Process Puts Effective Implementation of Treasury’s Governmentwide Financial Report System at Risk (No. GAO-06-413). 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

Echols, K. I. (2017). Authentic Leadership, Research Integrity, and Institutions of Higher Learning: Why Focusing on Departmental Leadership is Critical for Preserving the Sanctity of Science (Doctoral dissertation). Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS.

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

Morris, M. (2015, March 15). Why Argue With a Dream? New York Times, p. ST6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Soden, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Soden, 2000; Thompson & Kanamarlapudi, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Thompson & Kanamarlapudi, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Shendure et al., 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Geophysical Research Letters
Abbreviation	Geophys. Res. Lett.
ISSN (print)	0094-8276
ISSN (online)	1944-8007
Scope	General Earth and Planetary Sciences Geophysics