How to format your references using the The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. 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

Harley D (2013) Scholarly communication: cultural contexts, evolving models. Science 342:80–82

A journal article with 2 authors

Yoshida N, Toyoda S (2000) Constraining the atmospheric N2O budget from intramolecular site preference in N2O isotopomers. Nature 405:330–334

A journal article with 3 authors

Hanotte O, Dessie T, Kemp S (2010) Ecology. Time to tap Africa’s livestock genomes. Science 328:1640–1641

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Stuart AJ, Kosintsev PA, Higham TFG, Lister AM (2004) Pleistocene to Holocene extinction dynamics in giant deer and woolly mammoth. Nature 431:684–689

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Horton I (2012) Ivor Horton’s Beginning Visual C++® 2012. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Jobbágy Á (ed) (2012) 5th European Conference of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering: 14–18 September 2011, Budapest, Hungary. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Peeters M (2015) CRC Liver Metastases. In: Van Cutsem E, Vogl TJ, Orsi F, Sobrero A (eds) Locoregional Tumor Therapy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 55–72

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 International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) Vitamin Supplement Prevents Noise-Induced Hearing Loss In Mice. In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 2018

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 (1973) In-Flight Escape Systems for Helicopters Should Be Developed To Prevent Fatalities. 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

Ott WH (2017) An Analysis of the Coordinated Implementation of Digitally-Aided Close Air Support: An Integrated Systems Engineering and Test & Evaluation Approach. Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University

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

Branch J (2016) Granular Perspective on a Suitable Shore. New York Times B12

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Harley 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Yoshida and Toyoda 2000; Harley 2013).

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

Two authors: (Yoshida and Toyoda 2000)
Three or more authors: (Stuart et al. 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment
Abbreviation	Int. J. Life Cycle Assess.
ISSN (print)	0948-3349
ISSN (online)	1614-7502
Scope	General Environmental Science