How to format your references using the Atoms citation style

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

Ball, P. Crisis Response: The New History. Nature 2011, 480, 447–448.

A journal article with 2 authors

Le Goff, L.; Lecuit, T. Developmental Biology. Gradient Scaling and Growth. Science 2011, 331, 1141–1142.

A journal article with 3 authors

Mojzsis, S.J.; Harrison, T.M.; Pidgeon, R.T. Oxygen-Isotope Evidence from Ancient Zircons for Liquid Water at the Earth’s Surface 4,300 Myr Ago. Nature 2001, 409, 178–181.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Férey, G.; Mellot-Draznieks, C.; Serre, C.; Millange, F.; Dutour, J.; Surblé, S.; Margiolaki, I. A Chromium Terephthalate-Based Solid with Unusually Large Pore Volumes and Surface Area. Science 2005, 309, 2040–2042.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Abracen, J.; Looman, J. Treatment of High-Risk Sexual Offenders; John Wiley & Sons, Ltd: Chichester, UK, 2015; ISBN 9781118980132.

An edited book

Econophysics Approaches to Large-Scale Business Data and Financial Crisis; Takayasu, M., Watanabe, T., Takayasu, H., Eds.; Springer Japan: Tokyo, 2010; ISBN 9784431538523.

A chapter in an edited book

Figueroa, I.; Tabareau, N.; Tanter, É. Effective Aspects: A Typed Monadic Embedding of Pointcuts and Advice. In Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development XI; Chiba, S., Tanter, É., Bodden, E., Maoz, S., Kienzle, J., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014; pp. 145–192 ISBN 9783642550980.

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 Atoms.

Blog post

Fang, J. What Can Rats Wearing Jackets Tell Us About Men Who Love Lingerie? Available online: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/what-can-rats-wearing-jackets-tell-us-about-men-who-love-lingerie/ (accessed on 30 October 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

Government Accountability Office Cost Recovery Practices Inconsistent With Government Policy; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1983;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Crivello, A. DNA Methylation of the Interferon-Gamma Promoter in Association with Overexpression of the Interferon-Gamma Gene in Periodontal Disease. Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill, NC, 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

Qiu, L. On an Unaltered Headline, and Those Quotation Marks. New York Times 2017, A16.

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	Atoms
Abbreviation	Atoms
ISSN (online)	2218-2004
Scope