How to format your references using the International Journal of Coal Geology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for International Journal of Coal 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
Read, P., 2011. Saturn: storm-clouds brooding on towering heights. Nature 475, 44–45.
A journal article with 2 authors
Renshaw, C.E., Schulson, E.M., 2001. Universal behaviour in compressive failure of brittle materials. Nature 412, 897–900.
A journal article with 3 authors
Bailes, F., Dean, R.T., Pearce, M.T., 2013. Music cognition as mental time travel. Sci. Rep. 3, 2690.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Juillerat, A., Bertonati, C., Dubois, G., Guyot, V., Thomas, S., Valton, J., Beurdeley, M., Silva, G.H., Daboussi, F., Duchateau, P., 2014. BurrH: a new modular DNA binding protein for genome engineering. Sci. Rep. 4, 3831.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Paul, C.R., 2011. Transmission Lines in Digital Systems for EMC Practitioners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.
An edited book
Piecha, T., Schroeder-Heister, P. (Eds.), 2016. Advances in Proof-Theoretic Semantics, Trends in Logic, Studia Logica Library. Springer International Publishing, Cham.
A chapter in an edited book
Christianson, B., Chowdhury, P.D., Malcolm, J., 2005. Auditable Anonymous Delegation, in: Jajodia, S., Mazumdar, C. (Eds.), Information Systems Security: First International Conference, ICISS 2005, Kolkata, India, December 19-21, 2005. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 66–76.

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 International Journal of Coal Geology.

Blog post
Fang, J., 2015. Trawling Below 600 Meters Hurts Both Biodiversity And Catch Values [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, 1980. Farmers Home Administration’s Computer-Based Unified Management Information System (No. 112851). 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
Renteria, Y., 2017. Respite services for post-adoption families transitioning from the child welfare system: A grant proposal (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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
Saslow, L., 2007. A $10 Million Grant for Homes for the Homeless. New York Times LI2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Read, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Read, 2011; Renshaw and Schulson, 2001).

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

  • Two authors: (Renshaw and Schulson, 2001)
  • Three or more authors: (Juillerat et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleInternational Journal of Coal Geology
AbbreviationInt. J. Coal Geol.
ISSN (print)0166-5162
ScopeEconomic Geology
Geology
Stratigraphy
Fuel Technology

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