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]

Watts S 2014 Society needs more than wonder to respect science Nature 508 151

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

McCann K L and Baserga S J 2013 Genetics. Mysterious ribosomopathies Science 341 849–50

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Szemenyei H, Hannon M and Long J A 2008 TOPLESS mediates auxin-dependent transcriptional repression during Arabidopsis embryogenesis Science 319 1384–6

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Trumpp A, Refaeli Y, Oskarsson T, Gasser S, Murphy M, Martin G R and Bishop J M 2001 c-Myc regulates mammalian body size by controlling cell number but not cell size Nature 414 768–73

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Fayngold M 2005 Special Relativity and Motions Faster than Light (Weinheim, FRG: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA)

An edited book

[1]

Asch J and Joye A 2006 Mathematical Physics of Quantum Mechanics: Selected and Refereed Lectures from QMath9 vol 690 (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Gomes A S, Alferes J J and Swift T 2010 Implementing Query Answering for Hybrid MKNF Knowledge Bases Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages: 12th International Symposium, PADL 2010, Madrid, Spain, January 18-19, 2010. Proceedings Lecture Notes in Computer Science ed M Carro and R Peña (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer) pp 25–39

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]

Andrews R 2016 This May Be The Most Accurate Map Of The World Ever Made 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 1978 Guidelines for Survey of the Pricing of Negotiated Noncompetitive DOD Prime Contracts With McDonnell Douglas and Raytheon and NASA Prime Contracts With General Electric (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]

Hertzog L 2013 Development and implementation of a prenatal postpartum depression education program for nurse practitioner students at California State University Long Beach Doctoral dissertation (Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach)

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]

Williams J 2016 Books by Clare Beams, Hans Herbert Grimm, April Ayers Lawson and Kelly Luce New York Times C4

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