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]

McCarthy W 2000 Programmable matter Nature 407 569

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Srivastava D and Ivey K N 2006 Potential of stem-cell-based therapies for heart disease Nature 441 1097–9

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Batey R T, Gilbert S D and Montange R K 2004 Structure of a natural guanine-responsive riboswitch complexed with the metabolite hypoxanthine Nature 432 411–5

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Soma A, Onodera A, Sugahara J, Kanai A, Yachie N, Tomita M, Kawamura F and Sekine Y 2007 Permuted tRNA genes expressed via a circular RNA intermediate in Cyanidioschyzon merolae Science 318 450–3

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Abulencia J P and Theodore L 2015 Open-Ended Problems (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

[1]

Asabere-Ameyaw A, Anamuah-Mensah J, Dei G S and Raheem K 2014 Indigenist African Development and Related Issues: Towards a Transdisciplinary Perspective (Rotterdam: SensePublishers)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Wallgrün J O 2010 Voronoi Graph Matching for Robot Localization and Mapping Transactions on Computational Science IX: Special Issue on Voronoi Diagrams in Science and Engineering Lecture Notes in Computer Science ed M L Gavrilova, C J K Tan and F Anton (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer) pp 76–108

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 Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Blog post

[1]

O`Callaghan J 2015 The Actual Building Blocks of Planets Have Been Spotted for the First Time Ever 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 2006 Aviation Safety: FAA’s Safety Efforts Generally Strong but Face Challenges (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]

Pincolini R 2017 Latchkey girls 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]

Poniewozik J 2017 War Is Hell? No, One-Dimensional New York Times AR116

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