How to format your references using the ACS Nano citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for ACS Nano. 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

(1)

Smaglik, P. The Best of Both Worlds. Seattle. Nature 2002, 417 (6889), 4–5.

A journal article with 2 authors

(1)

Sachs, M. S.; Geballe, A. P. Biochemistry. Sense and Sensitivity--Controlling the Ribosome. Science 2002, 297 (5588), 1820–1821.

A journal article with 3 authors

(1)

Sun, L.; Song, K.; Hase, W. L. A SN2 Reaction That Avoids Its Deep Potential Energy Minimum. Science 2002, 296 (5569), 875–878.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

(1)

Hirota, K.; Miyoshi, T.; Kugou, K.; Hoffman, C. S.; Shibata, T.; Ohta, K. Stepwise Chromatin Remodelling by a Cascade of Transcription Initiation of Non-Coding RNAs. Nature 2008, 456 (7218), 130–134.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

(1)

Hübschmann, H.-J. Handbook of GC-MS; Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA: Weinheim, Germany, 2015.

An edited book

(1)

Coordination Models and Languages: 17th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, COORDINATION 2015, Held as Part of the 10th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2015, Grenoble, France, June 2-4, 2015, Proceedings; Holvoet, T., Viroli, M., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer International Publishing: Cham, 2015; Vol. 9037.

A chapter in an edited book

(1)

Fournais, S.; Helffer, B. Constant Field Models in Dimension 2: Noncompact Case. In Spectral Methods in Surface Superconductivity; Helffer, B., Ed.; Birkhäuser: Boston, MA, 2009; pp 45–50.

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 ACS Nano.

Blog post

(1)

Andrews, R. Spring Just Arrived In America Three Weeks Early. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/spring-arrived-america-three-weeks-early/ (accessed 2018-10-30).

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

(1)

Government Accountability Office. Business Systems Modernization: Internal Revenue Service’s Fiscal Year 2006 Expenditure Plan; GAO-06-360; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 2006.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

(1)

Murillo, K. An Analysis of California Community College Budget Policy Key Components in Multicollege Districts. Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, 2010.

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

(1)

Kishkovsky, S. In Aisle 3, Merchandise and Perhaps a Masterpiece; Russia’s New Rich Amass Art Collections, Displaying Them in Varied Ways. New York Times. March 29, 2004, p E1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

This sentence cites one reference ¹.
This sentence cites two references ^1,2.
This sentence cites four references ^1–4.

About the journal

Full journal title	ACS Nano
Abbreviation	ACS Nano
ISSN (print)	1936-0851
ISSN (online)	1936-086X
Scope	General Engineering General Materials Science General Physics and Astronomy