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All About ReferencesBy Rachel A. Russell, American Mineralogist Managing Editor; edited by Christine K. Elrod, Assistant Editor References are very important because they help you prove your arguments,
document the research, provide background, and so on. All
scientists ought to understand their value. It is
surprising how often the reference section and the citations in a paper
have problems. The key point with references is to allow the reader to find your
background material. If you do nothing else, supply too much information
rather than too little. Think to yourself, can someone find the book "Geology
Today" with just an author name and year? Probably not. Can they find it
with a publisher's name? Maybe. But throw in the city where the publisher is
located (the main sales office) and then they can certainly track down that
book. The first way that American Mineralogist, like all journals, aids this process is by having a standard style. Submitting
your manuscript with properly formatted references and complete in-text
citations will speed up the editorial process. Understanding our style is not hard, but there are many details. Here
we discuss the order of references, the basic journal citation
format, and discuss a few variations of the basic. Quick tips--What helps the editorial office the most:
Ordering References There are 3 basic types of references to order: 1-author documents, 2-author documents, and 3(+)-author documents. List all your references in alphabetical order by last name (initials are irrelevant for sorting). For references with the same last name, follow this order: 1-author, then 2-author, followed by 3(+)-author documents, in chronological order. Here are examples, in the correct format and order:
From the top: Andreozzi and Lucchesi (2002) is first, followed alphabetically by Andreozzi and Princivalle (2002). Last are Andreozzi et al. listed chronologically: 2000, 2001. Note: in print, duplicate author lists are replaced by 3 m-dashes, e.g., two references by "Smith and Dymek", the second instance in the list would be replaced by 3 dashes so as to not repeat in the list. If you see this change on your proofs, don't worry! (And don't bother marking it...it is our style.) Formatting Note a few other things about those made-up entries.
When multiple initials are used there are no spaces (e.g., Jones, D.H.). Suffixes,
such as Jr. and III, go after the initials,
with a space (e.g., Bosworth, M.R. Jr.). The year is in parentheses, with no colons, commas, or other punctuation. Generally only Roman (plain text) characters are used throughout the
references. The titles are not in italic, no numbers are in bold, and issue
numbers are only needed when the pages start at 1 for each issue, which is rare.
Titles end in periods. Our style is very uncluttered. The journal name is fully spelled out! This is the most common and most tedious mistake to fix. I have been
in publishing a long time, and my experience is that abbreviating journal
names is more trouble than the tiny amount of space saved is worth. Trust me,
all of you would abbreviate the journal name differently, and I would have to
come up with standards and fix them all. But most importantly, what we want
is for the reader to be able to find the reference. Spelling out the name
prevents any confusion whatsoever. Also note that the title of the article or book or whatever should be
exactly whatever it is. This is "quoted material" so I do not alter
it in anyway and I assume that you have quoted it correctly, right down to
misspellings, British spellings, or whatever. Book titles follow "initial caps" format, e.g. The History of Rocks. For journal
titles and chapter titles, use "sentence case," meaning capitalize the first
word, proper nouns, etc., e.g., Eruptions of St. Mary's volcano through the ages;
A study of Pb minerals. Citations In the text, the first basic thing is to use "et al." for
multiple authors (do not write "Smith, Jones, and Dymek (1990)
discovered..." Instead write "Smith et al. (1990)
discovered.."). The second basic thing is to use a semi-colon between
multiple citations with commas between citations for the same author set
(e.g., Smith 1999; Jones 1929; Conway and Dymek 1980, 1984; Jones et al.
1988, 1994). The two Jones may have completely different authors, doesn't
matter because the reader will be able to quickly find them both
chronologically. Here are citation examples for the made-up references above: Smith (1990) (Smith 1991) (Smith 1990, 1991) Smith and Dymek (1980, 1990) (Smith and Dymek 1990) Smith et al. (1989) (Smith et al. 1992) Other info References in languages other than English need to have that information
as follows, e.g., "Nishimura, K. (2008) Calcium and magnesium arsenates. Mineral
and Metallurgy Bulletin, 43, 206-207 (in Japanese). Submitted and "in review" work is not listed in the references cited. Just
put a note in the text, e.g., "Clark, in review" "Smith and Jones, in
preparation". In press: List the article info, DOI if you have it, and say "in
press," e.g., Klein, C. (2006) Clay minerals in America. Clays Journal, in
press, DOI: 10.claysmin.444.118909. (Note: citations would be "Klein 2006"
the reader will discover "in press" when they consult the list.) Further examples I have added a bunch of examples of different types of formats below. I
also have a few notes of explanation. But I want to repeat a big warning: do
not lose sight of the purpose of references. The purpose is to prove your
points by allowing people to find previous literature. That's it. We can and
do and will fix a lot of minor things about references, but if the
information isn't there to allow someone to find the reference, then all the
comma placement in the world simply doesn't matter. And, in point of fact,
you may have beautifully formatted references, but if your paper is not good,
then it doesn't matter. So I expect scientists to do their best with the
references, as with all aspects of a paper, but keep it in perspective! Reference types:
Smith, J. (2000) The theory of rocks. American Mineralogist, 85, 5-17.
Smith, J. (1962) The first
theory of rocks, 534 p. Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois,
Champaign-Urbana.
Smith, J. (1969) The secret life of rebellious rocks, 432 p. Wiley, New York.
Editor as cited author: Chapter in book with editors: Chapter in a series, such as
(shameless plug) Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry:
Smith, J. (1971) The truth of rocks in Florida. In B. Jones and C. Doe, Eds., Proceedings of the third conference on Florida rocks, p. 224-228. Mineralogical Society of Florida, Miami. Back to Information for Authors. |