How to format your references using the Science of the Total Environment citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Science of the Total Environment. 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
Huch, M., 2015. Regenerative biology: The versatile and plastic liver. Nature 517, 155–156.
A journal article with 2 authors
Cohen, J.E., Gürtler, R.E., 2001. Modeling household transmission of American trypanosomiasis. Science 293, 694–698.
A journal article with 3 authors
Kim, V.N., Kataoka, N., Dreyfuss, G., 2001. Role of the nonsense-mediated decay factor hUpf3 in the splicing-dependent exon-exon junction complex. Science 293, 1832–1836.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Leeman, D.S., Hebestreit, K., Ruetz, T., Webb, A.E., McKay, A., Pollina, E.A., Dulken, B.W., Zhao, X., Yeo, R.W., Ho, T.T., Mahmoudi, S., Devarajan, K., Passegué, E., Rando, T.A., Frydman, J., Brunet, A., 2018. Lysosome activation clears aggregates and enhances quiescent neural stem cell activation during aging. Science 359, 1277–1283.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Lindahl, D., 2008. Multi-Family Millions. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.
An edited book
Mezzadra, S., Reid, J., Samaddar, R. (Eds.), 2013. The Biopolitics of Development: Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present. Springer India, New Delhi.
A chapter in an edited book
Herout, A., Dubská, M., Havel, J., 2013. PClines: Line Parameterization Based on Parallel Coordinates, in: Dubská, M., Havel, Jiří (Eds.), Real-Time Detection of Lines and Grids: By PClines and Other Approaches, SpringerBriefs in Computer Science. Springer, London, pp. 35–40.

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 Science of the Total Environment.

Blog post
Carpineti, A., 2016. Early Giant Galaxy Seen Gorging On Intergalactic Gas [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, 2014. Biosurveillance: Observations on the Cancellation of BioWatch Gen-3 and Future Considerations for the Program (No. GAO-14-267T). 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
Saguilig, L.G., 2017. A Clinical Decision Support System for the Prevention of Genetic-Related Heart Disease (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
Leland, J., 2017. Midcentury City. New York Times MB10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Huch, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Cohen and Gürtler, 2001; Huch, 2015).

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

  • Two authors: (Cohen and Gürtler, 2001)
  • Three or more authors: (Leeman et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal titleScience of the Total Environment
AbbreviationSci. Total Environ.
ISSN (print)0048-9697
ScopeEnvironmental Chemistry
Environmental Engineering
Pollution
Waste Management and Disposal

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