How to format your references using the ACS Photonics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for ACS Photonics. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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)

Baillie, J. K. Translational Genomics. Targeting the Host Immune Response to Fight Infection. Science 2014, 344 (6186), 807–808.

A journal article with 2 authors

(1)

KelIy, C. K.; Bowler, M. G. Coexistence and Relative Abundance in Forest Trees. Nature 2002, 417 (6887), 437–440.

A journal article with 3 authors

(1)

Ellis, A. S.; Johnson, T. M.; Bullen, T. D. Chromium Isotopes and the Fate of Hexavalent Chromium in the Environment. Science 2002, 295 (5562), 2060–2062.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

(1)

Blanford, J. I.; Blanford, S.; Crane, R. G.; Mann, M. E.; Paaijmans, K. P.; Schreiber, K. V.; Thomas, M. B. Implications of Temperature Variation for Malaria Parasite Development across Africa. Sci. Rep. 2013, 3, 1300.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

(1)

Center for Chemical Process Safety. Guidelines for Process Safety in Batch Reaction Systems; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ, 1999.

An edited book

(1)

Unconventional Computing: 7th International Conference, UC 2008 Vienna, Austria, August 25-28, 2008. Proceedings; Calude, C. S., Costa, J. F., Freund, R., Oswald, M., Rozenberg, G., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008; Vol. 5204.

A chapter in an edited book

(1)

Bhattacharyya, A. Colonial Madness: Community and Lunacy in Nineteenth-Century India. In Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World: The Modern Period; Winterbottom, A., Tesfaye, F., Eds.; Palgrave Macmillan US: New York, NY, 2016; pp 89–113.

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 Photonics.

Blog post

(1)

Hale, T. Farmers Stumble Across Mammoth Skeleton In Their Soybean Field. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/farmers-find-mammoth-skeleton-their-soybean-field/ (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. Federal Student Aid: Highlights of a Study Group on Simplifying the Free Application for Federal Student Aid; GAO-10-29; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 2009.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

(1)

Diniega, S. Modeling Aeolian Dune and Dune Field Evolution. Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 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)

Gurley, G. Bright Lights, Big City (Redux). New York Times. March 3, 2013, p ST1.

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 Photonics
Abbreviation	ACS Photonics
ISSN (online)	2330-4022
Scope