How to format your references using the Green Letters citation style

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

Maxted, Pierre F. L. 2006. “Astronomy. A Ghostly Star Revealed in Silhouette.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 314 (5805): 1550–1551.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kwon, Hyung-Bae, and Bernardo L. Sabatini. 2011. “Glutamate Induces de Novo Growth of Functional Spines in Developing Cortex.” Nature 474 (7349): 100–104.

A journal article with 3 authors

Scherer, E., C. Munker, and K. Mezger. 2001. “Calibration of the Lutetium-Hafnium Clock.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 293 (5530): 683–687.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Piao, Shilong, Jingyun Fang, Philippe Ciais, Philippe Peylin, Yao Huang, Stephen Sitch, and Tao Wang. 2009. “The Carbon Balance of Terrestrial Ecosystems in China.” Nature 458 (7241): 1009–1013.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Jäger, Wolfram, and Gero Marzahn. 2010. Mauerwerk. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

Schmidt-Traub, Henner. 2006. Integrated Reaction and Separation Operations: Modelling and Experimental Validation. Edited by Andrzej Górak. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Cacciola, Pierfrancesco, and Giuseppe Muscolino. 2011. “Stochastic Seismic Analysis of Large Linear Structural Systems Under Fully Non-Stationary Spectrum Compatible Ground Motion.” In Computational Methods in Stochastic Dynamics, edited by Manolis Papadrakakis, George Stefanou, and Vissarion Papadopoulos, 89–109. Computational Methods in Applied Sciences. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

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 Green Letters.

Blog post

Davis, Josh. 2015. “Bats Worth Over A Billion Dollars In Pest Control Services.” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/bats-worth-over-billion-dollars-pest-control-services/.

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. 1994. Highway Planning: Agencies Are Attempting to Expedite Environmental Reviews, but Barriers Remain. RCED-94-211. 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

Bryant, Joseph Daniel. 2014. “The Investigation of Self-Determination in Students Participating in Higher Education with an Invisible Disability.” Doctoral dissertation, St. Charles, MO: Lindenwood University.

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

Feeney, Kelly. 2006. “QUICK BITE/Newark; The Best of Brazil.” New York Times, September 10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Maxted 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Maxted 2006; Kwon and Sabatini 2011).

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

Two authors: (Kwon and Sabatini 2011)
Three authors: (Scherer, Munker, and Mezger 2001)
4 or more authors: (Piao et al. 2009)

About the journal

Full journal title	Green Letters
ISSN (print)	1468-8417
ISSN (online)	2168-1414
Scope	Literature and Literary Theory