How to format your references using the Precambrian Research citation style

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

Hartmann, W.K., 2000. The paradigm and the pendulum. Nature 404, 817.

A journal article with 2 authors

McGuire, J.J., Beroza, G.C., 2012. Geophysics. A rogue earthquake off Sumatra. Science 336, 1118–1119.

A journal article with 3 authors

Yu, Q., Geng, Y., Sicinski, P., 2001. Specific protection against breast cancers by cyclin D1 ablation. Nature 411, 1017–1021.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Garfield, A.S., Cowley, M., Smith, F.M., Moorwood, K., Stewart-Cox, J.E., Gilroy, K., Baker, S., Xia, J., Dalley, J.W., Hurst, L.D., Wilkinson, L.S., Isles, A.R., Ward, A., 2011. Distinct physiological and behavioural functions for parental alleles of imprinted Grb10. Nature 469, 534–538.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Neupert, R., 2011. French Animation History. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK.

An edited book

Schuler, D. (Ed.), 2007. Online Communities and Social Computing: Second International Conference, OCSC 2007, Held as Part of HCI International 2007, Beijing, China, July 22-27, 2007. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

de Melo Bezerra, J., Santos Diniz, L., da Silva Montalvão, V., Hirata, C.M., 2016. Motivating Online Teams: An Investigation on Task Significance, Coordination and Incentive Mechanisms, in: Monfort, V., Krempels, K.-H., Majchrzak, T.A., Turk, Ž. (Eds.), Web Information Systems and Technologies: 11th International Conference, WEBIST 2015, Lisbon, Portugal, May 20–22, 2015, Revised Selected Papers, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 93–108.

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 Precambrian Research.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2014. Explainer: Why Rosetta Comet Mission is Such a Big Deal [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, 1986. Data Processing: SBA Needs To Strengthen Management of Its Computer Systems (No. IMTEC-86-28). 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

Jenrich, M.A., 2017. “To treat her as a woman”: African American women and respectability in New York, 1860-1890 (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

Bidgood, J., 2017. In Storm-Filled Season, Hurricane Nate Is Greeted With Relief. New York Times A12.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Hartmann, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Hartmann, 2000; McGuire and Beroza, 2012).

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

Two authors: (McGuire and Beroza, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Garfield et al., 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	Precambrian Research
Abbreviation	Precambrian Res.
ISSN (print)	0301-9268
Scope	Geochemistry and Petrology Geology