How to format your references using the Materials Discovery Today citation style

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

P.J. Bowler, Portraits of science. Climb Chimborazo and see the world, Science 298 (2002) 63–64.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

T. Bliss, R. Schoepfer, Neuroscience. Controlling the ups and downs of synaptic strength, Science 304 (2004) 973–974.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

J. Liu, P. Gong, X. Zhou, The association between romantic relationship status and 5-HT1A gene in young adults, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 7049.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

W. Xu, X. Min, X. Chen, Y. Zhu, P. Zhou, S. Cui, S. Xu, L. Tao, H. Song, Ag-SiO₂-Er₂O₃ nanocomposites: highly effective upconversion luminescence at high power excitation and high temperature, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 5087.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

D.B. Gowler, James Through the Centuries, John Wiley & Sons, Oxford, 2013.

An edited book

[1]

H.H.P. Nguyen, M.A. Cenci, eds., Behavioral Neurobiology of Huntington’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

K. Intemann, I. de Melo-Martín, Feminist Values, Commercial Values, and the Bias Paradox in Biomedical Research, in: M.C. Amoretti, N. Vassallo (Eds.), Meta-Philosophical Reflection on Feminist Philosophies of Science, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016: pp. 75–89.

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 Discovery Today.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Discovery of More Genes Associated With Alzheimer’s Disease, IFLScience (2013). https://www.iflscience.com/brain/discovery-more-genes-associated-alzheimer’s-disease/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Federal Research: Evaluation of Small Business Innovation Research Can Be Strengthened, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1999.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

R. Colchero Dorado, Recovering memory in Jordi Soler’s “Los rojos de ultramar,” Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2008.

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. Barron, Famous for Its Past, a Small New Jersey Town Struggles to Define Its Future, New York Times (2016) A17.

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 Discovery Today
ISSN (print)	2352-9245
Scope