How to format your references using the Matter citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Matter. 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

Davies, P. (2005). A quantum recipe for life. Nature 437, 819.

A journal article with 2 authors

Bossuyt, F., and Milinkovitch, M.C. (2001). Amphibians as indicators of early tertiary “out-of-India” dispersal of vertebrates. Science 292, 93–95.

A journal article with 3 authors

Ranganathan, R., Cannon, S.C., and Horvitz, H.R. (2000). MOD-1 is a serotonin-gated chloride channel that modulates locomotory behaviour in C. elegans. Nature 408, 470–475.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Socolich, M., Lockless, S.W., Russ, W.P., Lee, H., Gardner, K.H., and Ranganathan, R. (2005). Evolutionary information for specifying a protein fold. Nature 437, 512–518.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Gonzalez, R., Qi, F., and Huang, B. (2016). Process Control System Fault Diagnosis: A Bayesian Approach (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd).

An edited book

Ehnholm, C. ed. (2009). Cellular Lipid Metabolism (Springer).

A chapter in an edited book

Sappington, T.W. (2014). Emerging issues in Integrated Pest Management Implementation and Adoption in the North Central USA. In Integrated Pest Management: Experiences with Implementation, Global Overview, Vol.4, R. Peshin and D. Pimentel, eds. (Springer Netherlands), pp. 65–97.

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 Matter.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014). This Will Revolutionize Education. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/why-has-technology-not-revolutionized-education/.

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 (2003). Airport Finance: Past Funding Levels May Not Be Sufficient to Cover Airports’ Planned Capital Development (U.S. Government Printing Office).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Lee, M.Y.-L. (2009). The intellectual origins of Lin Yutang’s cultural internationalism, 1928–1938.

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

Eligon, J. (2017). T. I. Writes Letters to Obama and Trump. New York Times, C3.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

This sentence cites one reference ².
This sentence cites two references ^2,4.
This sentence cites four references ^2,4,6,8.

About the journal

Full journal title	Matter
ISSN (online)	2590-2385
Scope