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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Materials Today Communications. 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. Smaglik, Ghosts in the machine, Nature 427 (2004) 867.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

L.M. Vaquero, M. Cebrian, The rich club phenomenon in the classroom, Sci. Rep. 3 (2013) 1174.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

E.B. Gonzales, T. Kawate, E. Gouaux, Pore architecture and ion sites in acid-sensing ion channels and P2X receptors, Nature 460 (2009) 599–604.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

E.C. Benesh, P.A. Humphrey, Q. Wang, K.H. Moley, Maternal high-fat diet induces hyperproliferation and alters Pten/Akt signaling in prostates of offspring, Sci. Rep. 3 (2013) 3466.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

V.K. Khanna, Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor IGBT Theory and Design, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2005.

An edited book

[1]

D.M. Gabbay, Conditionals and Modularity in General Logics, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A.O. Benz, M. Battaglia, N. Vilmer, Location of Decimetric Pulsations in Solar Flares, in: C. Marqué, A. Nindos (Eds.), Energy Storage and Release through the Solar Activity Cycle: Models Meet Radio Observations, Springer, New York, NY, 2012: pp. 57–69.

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 Today Communications.

Blog post

[1]

S. Luntz, Textbooks Have Been Getting Fern Sex Wrong, Paper Claims, IFLScience (2016).

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, Information Systems: Agencies Overlook Security Controls During Development, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1988.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

S.F. Mitchell, Life-review therapy: A prevention program for the elderly who are experiencing life transitions. A grant proposal, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 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

[1]

L. Lee, The Whole Earth Is at Stake, but It’s Just a Game, New York Times (1995) 223.

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 Today Communications
Abbreviation	Mater. Today Commun.
ISSN (print)	2352-4928
Scope	Mechanics of Materials General Materials Science Materials Chemistry