How to format your references using the The Astrophysical Journal Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 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

Check, E. 2002, Nature, 420, 735

A journal article with 2 authors

Thompson, J., & Lukin, M. D. 2014, Science, 345, 272

A journal article with 3 authors

Laporte, S. A., Oakley, R. H., & Caron, M. G. 2001, Science, 293, 62

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Martin, M. S., Theodore, N. D., Wei, C.-C., & Shao, L. 2014, Sci Rep, 4, 6744

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Goering, H., Roos, H.-G., & Tobiska, L. 2010, Die Finite-Elemente-Methode für Anfänger (Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA)

An edited book

Mehler, A., Sharoff, S., & Santini, M. 2011, Genres on the Web: Computational Models and Empirical Studies, Vol. 42 (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands)

A chapter in an edited book

Bider, I., Perjons, E., & Elias, M. 2012, in The Practice of Enterprise Modeling: 5th IFIP WG 8.1 Working Conference, PoEM 2012, Rostock, Germany, November 7-8, 2012. Proceedings, ed. K. Sandkuhl, U. Seigerroth, & J. Stirna (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 61

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 The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Blog post

Andrew, E. 2016, IFLScience (IFLScience), https://www.iflscience.com/space/stars-planets-strange-orbits-what-s-going/

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. 2017, Homeland Security: Progress Made to Implement IT Reform, but Additional Chief Information Officer Involvement Needed (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

Schloesser, K. 2010, Improving services for persons with developmental disabilities through the utilization of person-centered thinking: A grant-writing project (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

Gordon, M. R. 2017, New York Times, A4

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Check 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Check 2002; Thompson & Lukin 2014).

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

Two authors: (Thompson & Lukin 2014)
Three or more authors: (Martin et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	The Astrophysical Journal Letters
Abbreviation	Astrophys. J. Lett.
ISSN (print)	2041-8205
ISSN (online)	2041-8213
Scope	Space and Planetary Science Astronomy and Astrophysics