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

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

T.C. Beers, Astronomy. The first generations of stars, Science. 309 (2005) 390–391.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

B. Luan, M.O. Robbins, The breakdown of continuum models for mechanical contacts, Nature. 435 (2005) 929–932.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

R.L. Moseley, F. Pulvermüller, Y. Shtyrov, Sensorimotor semantics on the spot: brain activity dissociates between conceptual categories within 150 ms, Sci. Rep. 3 (2013) 1928.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

L. Sun, F. Banhart, A.V. Krasheninnikov, J.A. Rodríguez-Manzo, M. Terrones, P.M. Ajayan, Carbon nanotubes as high-pressure cylinders and nanoextruders, Science. 312 (2006) 1199–1202.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

D. Rios Insua, F. Ruggeri, M.P. Wiper, Bayesian Analysis of Stochastic Process Models: Ruggeri/Bayesian Analysis of Stochastic Process Models, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2012.

An edited book

[1]

A.P.B. Saad, Wear Prediction on Total Ankle Replacement: Effect of Design Parameters, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

M.S. Conklin, Beyond Low-Hanging Fruit: Seeking the Next Generation in FLOSS Data Mining, in: E. Damiani, B. Fitzgerald, W. Scacchi, M. Scotto, G. Succi (Eds.), Open Source Systems: IFIP Working Group 2.13 Foundation on Open Source Software, June 8–10, 2006, Como, Italy, Springer US, Boston, MA, 2006: pp. 47–56.

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 Sustainability.

Blog post

[1]

A. Carpineti, We Could Be On The Brink Of Discovering Something Extraordinary At The Large Hadron Collider, IFLScience. (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/physics/we-are-one-edge-discovery-brand-new-physics/ (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, Human Services: Sustained and Coordinated Efforts Could Facilitate Data Sharing While Protecting Privacy, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2013.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

S.D. Hartl, The role of culture in managing diversity: How culturally based heuristics differ in minority and non-minority managerial decision making, Doctoral dissertation, Capella University, 2012.

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]

O. Kelly, The Nation; What the Rosenberg Papers Show The Surprise Final Witness, New York Times. (1975) The Week In ReviewE4.

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 Sustainability
ISSN (print)	2589-2347
Scope

Research and Writing Guides