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Environmental Sciences

This guide serves the Duke community (students, staff, and faculty) in supporting research in environmental sciences.

Anatomy of a citation

Many publications in the environmental sciences use the Council of Science Editors (CSE) citation style. Here is how to cite three major reference types using this style.

Color-coded examples of CSE citations for journals, book chapters, and book reference types.

Environmental sciences citation styles

Each academic discipline uses its own citation style. You may be familiar with APA, MLA, or Chicago/Turabian. APA is widely used across the social sciences while MLA and Chicago are typically used in the humanities. The sciences, however, tend to use the citation style of their foremost professional organization. If you're not sure which citation style to use for an assignment, ask your instructor!

The most commonly used citation styles in the environmental sciences are:


Check out these great quick-start guides for each of these styles:

Citation management tools

Citation tools allow you to save and organize your research. They also let you create formatted bibliographies in Word.

Endnote product logo

Downloadable as a standalone program from OIT, EndNote is a powerful citation tool for organizing your research and creating formatted citations. In addition to the standalone option, you can create an EndNote Web account.

This feature will look for and then download full-text PDFs of articles in your references. You will have to authenticate with your NetID so that EndNote knows which journals you can access through Duke Libraries.

  1. Get to your preferences by going to Edit > Preferences
  2. Choose Find Full Text
  3. Make sure OpenURL is checked and enter https://duke.userservices.exlibrisgroup.com/openurl/01DUKE_INST/01DUKE_INST:Services into the OpenURL Path field
  4. Enter https://login.proxy.lib.duke.edu/login?url= into the Authenticate URL field
  5. Click OK

Zotero product logo

Downloadable as a standalone program or a Firefox extension, Zotero is designed to store content in any format, including PDFs, images, audio and video files, and snapshots of web pages. Zotero operates with thousands of sites, and automatically indexes your library for ease of access. Zotero is open access (free!).