How to format your references using the Nanoscale Research Letters citation style

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

Kojevnikov A (2007) Russian science: the little ball made science bigger. Nature 449:542

A journal article with 2 authors

Lippincott-Schwartz J, Patterson GH (2003) Development and use of fluorescent protein markers in living cells. Science 300:87–91

A journal article with 3 authors

Bao H, Lyons JR, Zhou C (2008) Triple oxygen isotope evidence for elevated CO2 levels after a Neoproterozoic glaciation. Nature 453:504–506

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Wertz IE, O’Rourke KM, Zhang Z, et al (2004) Human De-etiolated-1 regulates c-Jun by assembling a CUL4A ubiquitin ligase. Science 303:1371–1374

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chase CW (2016) Next Generation Demand Management. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Rauner F, Maclean R (2008) Handbook of Technical and Vocational Education and Training Research. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Messali Z, Soltani F (2008) Distributed Pre-Processed CA-CFAR Detection Structure For Non Gaussian Clutter Reduction. In: Damiani E, Yétongnon K, Schelkens P, et al (eds) Signal Processing for Image Enhancement and Multimedia Processing. Springer US, Boston, MA, pp 49–57

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 Nanoscale Research Letters.

Blog post

O`Callaghan J (2017) We Just Learned A Lot Of Unexpected Things About Jupiter. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/we-just-learned-a-lot-of-unexpected-things-about-jupiter/. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (1973) Need for Improved Controls for Identifying and Correcting Safety Defects on Light Aircraft. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Johnson TF (2017) The Aircraft Electric Taxi System: A Qualitative Multi Case Study. Doctoral dissertation, Northcentral University

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

Walsh MW (2014) No Smoke, No Mirrors: The Dutch Pension Plan. New York Times BU1

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	Nanoscale Research Letters
Abbreviation	Nanoscale Res. Lett.
ISSN (print)	1931-7573
ISSN (online)	1556-276X
Scope	General Materials Science Condensed Matter Physics