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

Saito T (2000) Support for the national science education act. Science 288:2318c

A journal article with 2 authors

Over H, Seitsonen AP (2002) Surface chemistry. Oxidation of metal surfaces. Science 297:2003–2005

A journal article with 3 authors

Mora C, Danovaro R, Loreau M (2014) Alternative hypotheses to explain why biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships are concave-up in some natural ecosystems but concave-down in manipulative experiments. Sci Rep 4:5427

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Shav-Tal Y, Darzacq X, Shenoy SM, et al (2004) Dynamics of single mRNPs in nuclei of living cells. Science 304:1797–1800

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Exposito E, Diop C (2014) Smart SOA Platforms in Cloud Computing Architectures. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Südholt M, Consel C (eds) (2007) Object-Oriented Technology. ECOOP 2006 Workshop Reader: ECOOP 2006 Workshops, Nantes, France, July 3-7, 2006, Final Reports. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Bernhardt R (2009) Discussion Following the Presentation by Rudolf Bernhardt. In: Deutsch U, Wolfrum R (eds) The European Court of Human Rights Overwhelmed by Applications: Problems and Possible Solutions. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 37–50

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 (2015) Weather Forecasting Is About To Get Even Better. 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 (1992) Mission Support Project: User Perceptions on Computer Use and Network Operations. 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

Aguilar M (2010) Latina single mothers: Perspectives on parenting. Doctoral dissertation, 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

Kishkovsky S (2014) Rev. Gleb Yakunin, 80, Russian Priest and Dissident. New York Times B14

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Saito 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Saito 2000; Over and Seitsonen 2002).

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

Two authors: (Over and Seitsonen 2002)
Three or more authors: (Shav-Tal 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

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