How to format your references using the Applied Surface Science citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Applied Surface Science. 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]

N. Fleming, Tell fans definitive calls are an impossible goal, Nature 497 (2013) 537.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

H. Elderfield, G. Ganssen, Past temperature and delta18O of surface ocean waters inferred from foraminiferal Mg/Ca ratios, Nature 405 (2000) 442–445.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

E. Laliberté, G. Zemunik, B.L. Turner, Environmental filtering explains variation in plant diversity along resource gradients, Science 345 (2014) 1602–1605.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

S. Bershtein, M. Segal, R. Bekerman, N. Tokuriki, D.S. Tawfik, Robustness-epistasis link shapes the fitness landscape of a randomly drifting protein, Nature 444 (2006) 929–932.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

J. Jenkinson, T. Hyde, S. Ahmad, Building Blocks for Learning: Occupational Therapy Approaches, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom, 2008.

An edited book

[1]

A. Sanayei, I. Zelinka, O.E. Rössler, eds., ISCS 2013: Interdisciplinary Symposium on Complex Systems, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

P. Meller, J. Gana, Perspectives on Latin American Technological Innovation, in: A. Foxley, B. Stallings (Eds.), Innovation and Inclusion in Latin America: Strategies to Avoid the Middle Income Trap, Palgrave Macmillan US, New York, NY, 2016: pp. 89–114.

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 Applied Surface Science.

Blog post

[1]

R. Andrews, The World’s Only Sample Of Metallic Hydrogen Just Vanished, IFLScience (2017). https://www.iflscience.com/physics/worlds-only-sample-metallic-hydrogen-vanished/ (accessed October 30, 2018).

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, Weather Forecasting: NWS Has Not Demonstrated That New Processing System Will Improve Mission Effectiveness, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1996.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

C.T. DeRose, Electro-optic polymers: Materials and devices, Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, 2009.

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]

L. Greenhouse, Supreme Court Turns Down Cases on Religious Separation, New York Times (2007) A18.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

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	Applied Surface Science
Abbreviation	Appl. Surf. Sci.
ISSN (print)	0169-4332
Scope	Surfaces, Coatings and Films