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

Kiick, K. L. (2007). Materials science. Polymer therapeutics. Science (New York, N.Y.), 317(5842), 1182–1183.

A journal article with 2 authors

Hunter, C. A., & Mayers, P. C. (2001). Knot tied around an octahedral metal centre. Nature, 411(6839), 763.

A journal article with 3 authors

Gaudelli, N. M., Long, D. H., & Townsend, C. A. (2015). β-Lactam formation by a non-ribosomal peptide synthetase during antibiotic biosynthesis. Nature, 520(7547), 383–387.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Scheerer, P., Park, J. H., Hildebrand, P. W., Kim, Y. J., Krauss, N., Choe, H.-W., et al. (2008). Crystal structure of opsin in its G-protein-interacting conformation. Nature, 455(7212), 497–502.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Placzek, D., Bielecki, R., Messing, M., & Schwarzer, F., Tunnel. (2016). Zielgenau bis ans Ende des Tunnels. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

Konnov, I. V. (2006). Generalized Convexity and Related Topics. (D. T. Luc & A. M. Rubinov, Eds.) (Vol. 583). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Scheidler, A., Merkle, D., & Middendorf, M. (2008). Congestion Control in Ant Like Moving Agent Systems. In M. Hinchey, A. Pagnoni, F. J. Rammig, & H. Schmeck (Eds.), Biologically-Inspired Collaborative Computing: IFIP 20th World Computer Congress, Second IFIP TC 10 International Conference on Biologically-Inspired Collaborative Computing, September 8–9, 2008, Milano, Italy (pp. 33–43). Boston, MA: Springer US.

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

Davis, J. (2017, January 3). World’s Oldest Known Orca Feared Dead. Retrieved October 30, 2018, from https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/worlds-oldest-known-orca-feared-dead/

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. (1991). Transportation: Status of GAO’s Open Recommendations on Transportation Policies and Programs (No. RCED-91-112). 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

Johnson, R. (2010). Grounding theatricality in reality: The creation of the role of Suzie in “Current Nobody” (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

Poniewozik, J. (2017, April 13). Long After the Departure, One More Cosmic Joke to Tell. New York Times, p. C14.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kiick, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Hunter & Mayers, 2001; Kiick, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Hunter & Mayers, 2001)
Three or more authors: (Scheerer et al., 2008)

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