How to format your references using the Transportation Research Part A citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Transportation Research Part A. 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

Arena, B.J., 2014. Outside my comfort zone. Science 345, 842.

A journal article with 2 authors

Barker, S., Elderfield, H., 2002. Foraminiferal calcification response to glacial-interglacial changes in atmospheric CO2. Science 297, 833–836.

A journal article with 3 authors

Wisniewski, W., Patschger, M., Rüssel, C., 2013. Viscous fingering and dendritic growth of surface crystallized Sr2TiSi2O8 fresnoite. Sci. Rep. 3, 3558.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Chen, L.Y., Parizi, K.B., Kosuge, H., Milaninia, K.M., McConnell, M.V., Wong, H.-S.P., Poon, A.S.Y., 2013. Mass fabrication and delivery of 3D multilayer μTags into living cells. Sci. Rep. 3, 2295.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Costa, P.J., 2017. Applied Mathematics for the Analysis of Biomedical Data. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Jelasity, M., Kalyvianaki, E. (Eds.), 2016. Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems: 16th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, DAIS 2016, Held as Part of the 11th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2016, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, June 6-9, 2016, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Kawai, T., Kushizaki, S., 2015. Diagnosis of Air-Conditioner by Using Its Dynamic Property, in: Tse, P.W., Mathew, J., Wong, K., Lam, R., Ko, C.N. (Eds.), Engineering Asset Management - Systems, Professional Practices and Certification: Proceedings of the 8th World Congress on Engineering Asset Management (WCEAM 2013) & the 3rd International Conference on Utility Management & Safety (ICUMAS), Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 43–52.

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 Transportation Research Part A.

Blog post

Andrews, R., 2017. NASA Finds Young Volcano On Mars That Outlived The Dinosaurs [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/space/nasa-young-volcano-mars-outlived-dinosaurs/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1978. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Organization Organic Act (No. 105671). 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

Cruz, S., 2014. Keeping families together: A grant proposal (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Shear, M.D., 2017. In Trump’s Silence, Pence Takes a Swipe at Russia. New York Times A8.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Arena, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Arena, 2014; Barker and Elderfield, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Barker and Elderfield, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Chen et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Transportation Research Part A
Abbreviation	Transp. Res. Part A Policy Pract.
ISSN (print)	0965-8564
Scope	Management Science and Operations Research Civil and Structural Engineering Transportation

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