How to format your references using the Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics citation style

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

[1]

Smaglik P 2003 A cold shoulder for stocks Nature 421 671

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Shaked Y and Rose A 2013 Microbiology. Seas of superoxide Science 340 1176–7

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Deng B, Zhang R Q and Shi X Q 2014 New insight into the spin-conserving excitation of the negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond Sci. Rep. 4 5144

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Mazurek M D, Schreiter K M, Prevedel R, Kaltenbaek R and Resch K J 2013 Dispersion-cancelled biological imaging with quantum-inspired interferometry Sci. Rep. 3 1582

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Hannam J 2017 What Everyone Needs to Know about Tax (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

[1]

Gresele P, Born G V R, Patrono C and Page C P 2012 Antiplatelet Agents vol 210 (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Cartland J and Ruch-Ross H S 2014 The Researcher’s Mark: What Researchers Bring to Communities, and What May or May Not be Left Behind When Their Work is Done Community Intervention: Clinical Sociology Perspectives Clinical Sociology: Research and Practice ed J M Fritz and J Rhéaume (New York, NY: Springer) pp 45–56

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 Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew E 2013 The First Trial Results of Artificial Blood Use Are Encouraging IFLScience

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office 2007 Business Modernization: NASA Must Consider Agencywide Needs to Reap the Full Benefits of Its Enterprise Management System Modernization Effort (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

[1]

Nadeau E M 2017 Baby Boomer Generation’s Knowledge of Alzheimer’s Disease Doctoral dissertation (Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach)

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

[1]

Sisario B 2017 Taylor Swift’s Single Breaks Spotify Record New York Times C3

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics
Abbreviation	Res. Astron. Astrophys.
ISSN (print)	1674-4527
Scope	Space and Planetary Science Astronomy and Astrophysics