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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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]

Friedman J M 2000 Obesity in the new millennium Nature 404 632–4

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

McLaughlin S and Murray D 2005 Plasma membrane phosphoinositide organization by protein electrostatics Nature 438 605–11

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Milinski M, Semmann D and Krambeck H-J 2002 Reputation helps solve the “tragedy of the commons” Nature 415 424–6

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Högbom M, Stenmark P, Voevodskaya N, McClarty G, Gräslund A and Nordlund P 2004 The radical site in chlamydial ribonucleotide reductase defines a new R2 subclass Science 305 245–8

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Matthys W and Lochman J E 2016 Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Conduct Disorder in Childhood (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

[1]

Fox P F 2015 Dairy Chemistry and Biochemistry ed T Uniacke-Lowe, P L H McSweeney and J A O’Mahony (Cham: Springer International Publishing)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Petri C A 2008 On the Physical Basics of Information Flow Applications and Theory of Petri Nets: 29th International Conference, PETRI NETS 2008, Xi’an, China, June 23-27, 2008. Proceedings Lecture Notes in Computer Science ed K M van Hee and R Valk (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer) pp 12–12

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]

Hamilton K 2017 Ancient Skeleton Reveals 10,000-Year Link To Modern Tribes In Pacific Northwest 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 2014 Market Research: Better Documentation Needed to Inform Future Procurements at Selected Agencies (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]

San K A 2017 Synthesis of Alkanethiolate-Capped Metal Nanoparticles Using Alkyl Thiosulfate Ligand Precursors for Selective Catalytic Reactions 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]

Chen D W and David Goodman J 2013 In Naming Top Police Official, De Blasio May Signal Change New York Times A1

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