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

Agrawal, A.F. Evolutionary Biology: Infection Elevates Diversity. Nature 2015, 525, 464–465.

A journal article with 2 authors

Heilbron, J.L.; Bynum, W.F. 1901 and All That. Nature 2001, 409, 13–16.

A journal article with 3 authors

Weaver, J.C.; Vaughan, T.E.; Astumian, R.D. Biological Sensing of Small Field Differences by Magnetically Sensitive Chemical Reactions. Nature 2000, 405, 707–709.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Liu, C.; Dutton, Z.; Behroozi, C.H.; Hau, L.V. Observation of Coherent Optical Information Storage in an Atomic Medium Using Halted Light Pulses. Nature 2001, 409, 490–493.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Anderson, J.B. Bandwidth Efficient Coding; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ, 2017; ISBN 9781119345244.

An edited book

Applied Computing & Information Technology; Lee, R., Ed.; Studies in Computational Intelligence; Springer International Publishing: Cham, 2016; Vol. 619; ISBN 9783319263946.

A chapter in an edited book

Xin, X.; Liu, Y. Pendubot. In Control Design and Analysis for Underactuated Robotic Systems; Liu, Y., Ed.; Springer: London, 2014; pp. 95–107 ISBN 9781447162506.

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

Hale, T. Greek City Trials Eco-Friendly Driverless Buses Available online: https://www.iflscience.com/technology/greek-city-trialling-eco-friendly-driverless-buses/ (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 [Comments on STURA Act’s Effects on Funding for Los Angeles Metrorail System]; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1987;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Kelly, L.A. Nursing Surveillance in the Acute Care Setting: Latent Variable Development and Analysis. Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona: Tucson, AZ, 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

Hollander, S. Rutgers Women Find Rhythm For 4th Straight Victory. New York Times 1999, D5.

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