How to format your references using the SOIL citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for SOIL. 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.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
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
Knowles, S. M.: Intellectual property. Fixing the legal framework for pharmaceutical research, Science, 327, 1083–1084, 2010.
A journal article with 2 authors
Moore, J. N. and Simmons, S. F.: Geophysics. More power from below, Science, 340, 933–934, 2013.
A journal article with 3 authors
Xiao, S., Zhou, C., and Yuan, X.: Palaeontology: undressing and redressing Ediacaran embryos, Nature, 446, E9-10; discussion E10-1, 2007.
A journal article with 100 or more authors
Zhang, H., Yang, B., Pomerantz, R. J., Zhang, C., Arunachalam, S. C., and Gao, L.: The cytidine deaminase CEM15 induces hypermutation in newly synthesized HIV-1 DNA, Nature, 424, 94–98, 2003.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Miller, M. A.: Internet Technologies Handbook, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2005.
An edited book
O’Donoghue, T.: Secondary School Education in Ireland: History, Memories and Life Stories, 1922–1967, edited by: Harford, J., Palgrave Macmillan UK, London, V, 256 p pp., 2016.
A chapter in an edited book
Piattoni, S.: Exploring European Union Macro-regional Strategies through the Lens of Multilevel Governance, in: A ‘Macro-regional’ Europe in the Making: Theoretical Approaches and Empirical Evidence, edited by: Gänzle, S. and Kern, K., Palgrave Macmillan UK, London, 75–97, 2016.

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 SOIL.

Blog post
The Secret Maoist Chinese Operation That Conquered Malaria – And Won A Nobel:

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: Airline Competition: DOT and Justice Oversight of Eastern Air Lines’ Bankruptcy, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1990.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation
Levy, M. R.: Visual perception and Gestalt grouping in the landscape: Are Gestalt grouping prinicples reliable indicators of visual preference?, Doctoral dissertation, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS, 2009.

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
Sophia Kishkovsky; Compiled B Y: Arts, Briefly; Rachmaninoff Score Unsold, New York Times, 14th December, E2, 2004.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Knowles, 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Knowles, 2010; Moore and Simmons, 2013).

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

  • Two authors: (Moore and Simmons, 2013)
  • Three or more authors: (Zhang et al., 2003)

About the journal

Full journal titleSOIL
ISSN (print)2199-3971
ISSN (online)2199-398X
Scope

Other styles