How to format your references using the Materials citation style

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

Tokmakoff, A. Chemistry. Shining Light on the Rapidly Evolving Structure of Water. Science 2007, 317, 54–55.

A journal article with 2 authors

Abbott, A.; Schiermeier, Q. Deep Roots of Nazi Science Revealed. Nature 2000, 407, 823–824.

A journal article with 3 authors

Furuya, T.; Kamlet, A.S.; Ritter, T. Catalysis for Fluorination and Trifluoromethylation. Nature 2011, 473, 470–477.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Feng, N.; Mi, W.; Cheng, Y.; Guo, Z.; Schwingenschlögl, U.; Bai, H. First Principles Prediction of the Magnetic Properties of Fe-X₆ (X = S, C, N, O, F) Doped Monolayer MoS₂. Sci. Rep. 2014, 4, 3987.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Niven, P.R. Balanced Scorecard Evolution; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ, 2014; ISBN 9781118915011.

An edited book

Proceedings of the 18th International Meshing Roundtable; Clark, B.W., Ed.; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009; ISBN 9783642043185.

A chapter in an edited book

Joshee, R.; Sihra, K. Shakti as a Liberatory and Educative Force for Hindu Women. In Gender, Religion and Education in a Chaotic Postmodern World; Gross, Z., Davies, L., Diab, A.-K., Eds.; Springer Netherlands: Dordrecht, 2013; pp. 73–82 ISBN 9789400752696.

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.

Blog post

Andrew, D. Why Men And Women Can’t Agree On The Perfect Temperature Available online: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/why-men-and-women-cant-agree-on-the-perfect-temperature/ (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 NASA: Projects Need More Disciplined Oversight and Management to Address Key Challenges; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 2009;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Garcia, M. Perception of Latino Students by Teachers and Counselors in the Educational System. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach: Long Beach, CA, 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

Williams, J. A Laugh Factory Looks Back. New York Times 2016, BR4.

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
Abbreviation	Materials (Basel)
ISSN (online)	1996-1944
Scope	General Materials Science