How to format your references using the Materials Characterization citation style

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

R. Triendl, Breaking down biological borders, Nature 418 (2002) 7.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

R. Sprangers, L.E. Kay, Quantitative dynamics and binding studies of the 20S proteasome by NMR, Nature 445 (2007) 618–622.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

M.I. McCormick, S.-A. Watson, P.L. Munday, Ocean acidification reverses competition for space as habitats degrade, Sci. Rep. 3 (2013) 3280.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

L.M. González, W.C. Ruder, P.R. Leduc, W.C. Messner, Controlling magnetotactic bacteria through an integrated nanofabricated metallic island and optical microscope approach, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 4104.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

K.C. Butler, Multinational Finance, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ, 2016.

An edited book

[1]

J. Cuellar, T. Maibaum, K. Sere, eds., FM 2008: Formal Methods: 15th International Symposium on Formal Methods, Turku, Finland, May 26-30, 2008 Proceedings, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

F. Schönthaler, G. Vossen, A. Oberweis, T. Karle, Areas of Application, in: G. Vossen, A. Oberweis, T. Karle (Eds.), Business Processes for Business Communities: Modeling Languages, Methods, Tools, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012: pp. 137–173.

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 Materials Characterization.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Why Do Elephants Rarely Get Cancer?, IFLScience (2015).

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, Relationship of Contractor and Grantee ADP Activities, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1971.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

N.A. Robert, Cortile: World Building & the Traveler Archetype, Doctoral dissertation, University of Louisiana, 2017.

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]

J. Koblin, Hackers Briefly Seize HBO’s Twitter Account in the Latest in a Series of Breaches, New York Times (2017) B3.

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	Materials Characterization
Abbreviation	Mater. Charact.
ISSN (print)	1044-5803
Scope	Mechanical Engineering Mechanics of Materials General Materials Science Condensed Matter Physics