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

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

Brock, S. L. 2007, Science, 317, 460

A journal article with 2 authors

Benkovic, S. J., & Hammes-Schiffer, S. 2003, Science, 301, 1196

A journal article with 3 authors

Kirichok, Y., Navarro, B., & Clapham, D. E. 2006, Nature, 439, 737

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Spierings, D., McStay, G., Saleh, M., et al. 2005, Science, 310, 66

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Islam, M. R., Islam, J. S., Zatzman, G. M., Mughal, M. A. H., & Rahman, M. S. 2016, The Greening of Pharmaceutical Engineering (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley &;#38; Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

De Salles, A. A. F., Gorgulho, A., Agazaryan, N., et al. 2011, Shaped Beam Radiosurgery: State of the Art (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

Beierle, C., Eichhorn, C., & Kern-Isberner, G. 2016, in Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems: 9th International Symposium, FoIKS 2016, Linz, Austria, March 7-11, 2016. Proceedings, ed. M. Gyssens, & G. Simari (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 65

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 Supplement Series.

Blog post

Luntz, S. 2014, IFLScience (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

Government Accountability Office. 1992, Guaranteed Student Loans: Eliminating Interest Rate Floors Could Generate Substantial Savings (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

Duran, P. E. 2010, Factors and prevention strategies to fight childhood obesity (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

Isherwood, C. 2016, New York Times, C2

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Brock 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Benkovic & Hammes-Schiffer 2003; Brock 2007).

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

Two authors: (Benkovic & Hammes-Schiffer 2003)
Three or more authors: (Spierings et al. 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series
Abbreviation	Astrophys. J. Suppl. Ser.
ISSN (print)	0067-0049
ISSN (online)	1538-4365
Scope	Space and Planetary Science Astronomy and Astrophysics