How to format your references using the Water Resources Research citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Water Resources Research. 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	Download the output style file
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

Robinson, K. (2006). Personal finance. Summer salary and other windfalls. Science (New York, N.Y.), 313(5792), 1455.

A journal article with 2 authors

Owusu-Ansah, E., & Banerjee, U. (2009). Reactive oxygen species prime Drosophila haematopoietic progenitors for differentiation. Nature, 461(7263), 537–541.

A journal article with 3 authors

Brown, M. E., Bouchez, A. H., & Griffith, C. A. (2002). Direct detection of variable tropospheric clouds near Titan’s south pole. Nature, 420(6917), 795–797.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Carlson, C. S., Eberle, M. A., Kruglyak, L., & Nickerson, D. A. (2004). Mapping complex disease loci in whole-genome association studies. Nature, 429(6990), 446–452.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Subramanian, M. N. (2013). Plastics Additives and Testing. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Luca, A. de. (2013). Teoria degli Automi Finiti. (F. D’Alessandro, Ed.) (Vol. 68). Milano: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Ouangraoua, A., & Raffinot, M. (2012). Faster and Simpler Minimal Conflicting Set Identification. In J. Kärkkäinen & J. Stoye (Eds.), Combinatorial Pattern Matching: 23rd Annual Symposium, CPM 2012, Helsinki, Finland, July 3-5, 2012. Proceedings (pp. 41–55). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

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 Water Resources Research.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, April 10). Being Obese Could Lower Dementia Risk, But Being Underweight Could Increase Risk. Retrieved October 30, 2018, from

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. (1995). Adult Education: Measuring Program Results Has Been Challenging (No. HEHS-95-153). 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

Pepper, I. (2010). On the Difference between Serialism and Seriality (Doctoral dissertation). Columbia University, New York, NY.

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

Kanter, J. (2017, May 12). ‘Stupid Us’: U.S. Retirees and Fraud Tied to E.U. Commissioner. New York Times, p. A5.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Robinson, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Owusu-Ansah & Banerjee, 2009; Robinson, 2006).

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

Two authors: (Owusu-Ansah & Banerjee, 2009)
Three or more authors: (Carlson et al., 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	Water Resources Research
Abbreviation	Water Resour. Res.
ISSN (print)	0043-1397
ISSN (online)	1944-7973
Scope	Water Science and Technology