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

Heymann, D.L. Ebola: Learn from the Past. Nature 2014, 514, 299–300.

A journal article with 2 authors

Cunningham, E.J.; Russell, A.F. Egg Investment Is Influenced by Male Attractiveness in the Mallard. Nature 2000, 404, 74–77.

A journal article with 3 authors

Rojstaczer, S.; Sterling, S.M.; Moore, N.J. Human Appropriation of Photosynthesis Products. Science 2001, 294, 2549–2552.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Meyer, J.; Kidambi, P.R.; Bayer, B.C.; Weijtens, C.; Kuhn, A.; Centeno, A.; Pesquera, A.; Zurutuza, A.; Robertson, J.; Hofmann, S. Metal Oxide Induced Charge Transfer Doping and Band Alignment of Graphene Electrodes for Efficient Organic Light Emitting Diodes. Sci. Rep. 2014, 4, 5380.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bernatz, R.A. Fourier Series and Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ, 2010; ISBN 9780470651384.

An edited book

AI 2011: Advances in Artificial Intelligence: 24th Australasian Joint Conference, Perth, Australia, December 5-8, 2011. Proceedings; Wang, D., Reynolds, M., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011; Vol. 7106; ISBN 9783642258312.

A chapter in an edited book

Clay, S.M.; Fong, S.S. Systems Biology. In Developing Biofuel Bioprocesses Using Systems and Synthetic Biology; Fong, S.S., Ed.; SpringerBriefs in Systems Biology; Springer: New York, NY, 2013; pp. 21–36 ISBN 9781461455790.

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

Davis, J. Stem Cells From Pregnant Women Could Reverse Aging In Bones Available online: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/stem-cells-from-pregnant-women-could-reverse-aging-in-bones/ (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 Interpretation of Continuing Education and Training Requirements; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1991;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Liu, T.-W.D. Isolation and Characterization of Pco-1, Which Encodes a Regulatory Protein That Controls Purine Degradation in Neurospora Crassa. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University: Columbus, OH, 2003.

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

Abad, S.; Casey, N. Race Is On to Find Survivors of Colombia Mudslide. New York Times 2017, A6.

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

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