How to format your references using the IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering. 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]

Brash D E 2015 Cancer. Preprocancer Science 348 867–8

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Holland M D and Hastings A 2008 Strong effect of dispersal network structure on ecological dynamics Nature 456 792–4

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Scaffidi P, Misteli T and Bianchi M E 2002 Release of chromatin protein HMGB1 by necrotic cells triggers inflammation Nature 418 191–5

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Cai D, Wu Z, Jiang J, Wu Y, Feng H, Brown I G, Chu P K and Yu Z 2014 Controlling nitrogen migration through micro-nano networks Sci. Rep. 4 3665

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Gywat O, Krenner H J and Berezovsky J 2009 Spins in Optically Active Quantum Dots (Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA)

An edited book

[1]

Abdulla R-I 2011 Heart Diseases in Children: A Pediatrician’s Guide (Boston, MA: Springer US)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

McGee R W and Yoon Y 2008 Enhancing Efficiency of Government Budget and Fiscal Policy: Some Advice for Transition and Developing Economies Taxation and Public Finance in Transition and Developing Economies ed R W McGee (Boston, MA: Springer US) pp 39–53

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 IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew E 2015 Blame It On Mum And Dad: How Genes Influence What We Eat IFLScience

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 2000 Space Station: Prime Contract Changes (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Eldridge Z 2017 The Empowerment of a Forgotten Population Doctoral dissertation (Washington, DC: George Washington University)

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]

Lee L 2014 Loving Trees, Even the Messy Ones New York Times D2

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	IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering
Abbreviation	IOP Conf. Ser. Mater. Sci. Eng.
ISSN (print)	1757-8981
ISSN (online)	1757-899X
Scope