How to format your references using the Polymer Bulletin citation style

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

Schiermeier Q (2004) Renaissance in Spain. Nature 428:448–449

A journal article with 2 authors

Müser MH, Shakhvorostov D (2010) Applied physics. Why thick can be slick. Science 328:52–53

A journal article with 3 authors

Ma H, Aihara K, Chen L (2014) Detecting causality from nonlinear dynamics with short-term time series. Sci Rep 4:7464

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Zitin A, Gorowara A, Squires S, et al (2014) Spatially embedded growing small-world networks. Sci Rep 4:7047

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bragg SM (2010) Running an Effective Investor Relations Department. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Barker G, Desjardins E, Pearce T (2014) Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Makino J (2013) GRAPE and GRAPE-DR. In: Yuen DA, Wang L, Chi X, et al (eds) GPU Solutions to Multi-scale Problems in Science and Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 79–87

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 Polymer Bulletin.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Elephant Crushes Car in Thailand. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/elephant-crushes-car-thailand/. 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 (2014) DOD Education Benefits: Action Is Needed to Ensure Evaluations of Postsecondary Schools Are Useful. 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

Amos AE (2010) Perceptions of the persistent: Academic experiences of first generation community college students. Doctoral dissertation, Capella 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

Vecsey G (2011) The Champions In Verse, And With Ghosts. New York Times SP4

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	Polymer Bulletin
Abbreviation	Polym. Bull. (Berl.)
ISSN (print)	0170-0839
ISSN (online)	1436-2449
Scope	General Chemistry Materials Chemistry Polymers and Plastics Condensed Matter Physics

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