How to format your references using the Geoscience Frontiers citation style

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

Goldstein, L., 2012. US election: Know your representatives. Nature 489, 494–495.

A journal article with 2 authors

Ramocki, M.B., Zoghbi, H.Y., 2008. Failure of neuronal homeostasis results in common neuropsychiatric phenotypes. Nature 455, 912–918.

A journal article with 3 authors

Ezawa, M., Tanaka, Y., Nagaosa, N., 2013. Topological phase transition without gap closing. Sci. Rep. 3, 2790.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Johnson, J., Canning, J., Kaneko, T., Pru, J.K., Tilly, J.L., 2004. Germline stem cells and follicular renewal in the postnatal mammalian ovary. Nature 428, 145–150.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Krichen, S., Chaouachi, J., 2014. Graph-Related Optimization and Decision Support Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Quirk, T.J., 2016. Excel 2013 for Physical Sciences Statistics: A Guide to Solving Practical Problems, 1st ed. 2016. ed, Excel for Statistics. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Lavacchi, A., Miller, H., Vizza, F., 2013. Carbon-Based Nanomaterials, in: Miller, H., Vizza, F. (Eds.), Nanotechnology in Electrocatalysis for Energy, Nanostructure Science and Technology. Springer, New York, NY, pp. 115–144.

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 Geoscience Frontiers.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2015. I’m Stuck Like Glue: Why I Love Magnets and you Should Too [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1976. Implementation of Section 1903(g) of the Social Security Act by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (No. MWD-76-89). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Schoenecker, K.D., 2010. Determinants of life satisfaction: Generated and ranked by undergraduate college students (Doctoral dissertation). Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

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

Wagner, J., 2017. Mets Win as Bruce Drives in Five Runs With Two Homers. New York Times B13.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Goldstein, 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Goldstein, 2012; Ramocki and Zoghbi, 2008).

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

Two authors: (Ramocki and Zoghbi, 2008)
Three or more authors: (Johnson et al., 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	Geoscience Frontiers
ISSN (print)	1674-9871
Scope