All About References

By Rachel A. Russell, American Mineralogist Managing Editor

References are very important because they help you prove your arguments, document the research, provide background, and so on. I am sure all scientists understand their value so I will not go into that. What is dismaying is how often the reference section and the citations in the 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. Because I go through and apply our style to your references, I quickly can figure out what information is missing and ask you for it. I can also quickly determine if citations in the text and the references don't match or are missing and ask you about that as well.

Therefore, we ask that authors at least try to put the references into our style. If authors took a moment to polish their references, I think it would make for stronger papers. Ultimately readers will benefit, because they will be able to find the references they need. Understanding our style is not hard, but there are a lot of details. Here I am going to discuss the order of references, the basic journal citation format, and discuss a few variations of the basic.

Ordering References

There are 3 basic types of references to order: one-author documents, two- author documents, and three-author documents. One-author and two-author documents go alphabetical, with one-author documents first. If there are exact doubles, then it goes chronologically.

Multiple author documents go last and by date. Think about the citations. If the references for the citations "Chrisman et al. 1990; Chrisman et al. 1995" were in alphabetical order you might take several minutes to find them because you don't know the second author. So instead you just look for the Chrisman multiple author listings and then the dates. Easy.

Here are (made-up) examples:

Smith, R. (1990) Under your feet: Geology today. McMasters, New York.

Smith, R. (1991) Below the ground: Our hidden riches. McMasters, New York.

Smith, R. and Dymek, R. (1980) Gold, my favorite mineral. Science, 65, 567-570.

Smith, R. and Dymek, R. (1990) Gold, my favorite mineral-Revisited. Science, 75, 367-370.

Smith, R. and Jones, D. (1970) Silver, the new favorite. Science, 75, 367-370.

Smith, R., Dymek, R., Anderson, B.P., and Jones, D. (1989) Zeolites. American Mineralogist, 75, 367-370.

Smith, R., Anderson, B., and Jones, D.H. (1992) The high-pressure studies of crystal chemistry at high pressures. American Mineralogist, 75, 367-370.

So, start at the top: naturally the single Smith's are first, and in order of date with the oldest material first. The doubles are next, with the oldest of the Smith and Dymek entries going first. The Smith and Jones entry follows the two Smith and Dymek entries because of alphabetical order.

The multiple Smith entries follow and here the alphabetical order does not matter, just put the earliest date first.

More Details

Note a few other things about those made-up entries. There are commas after each last name, and commas in a series. There is a comma before "and" only when it is more than two. When double initials are used there are no spaces. The year is in parentheses, with no colons. 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. 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.

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.

Your attention to details will be greatly appreciated by your editor. As time goes by, I'll put examples of more types of references in the web version of this article (http://www.minsocam.org then click on American Mineralogist!).