How to format your references using the Progress in Natural Science: Materials International citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Progress in Natural Science: Materials International. 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]

J.M. Laming, Astronomy. More supernova surprises, Science. 329 (2010) 1604–1605.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

B.U. Haq, S.R. Schutter, A chronology of Paleozoic sea-level changes, Science. 322 (2008) 64–68.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

J.E. Penner, L.D. Rotstayn, T.J. Crowley, Indirect aerosol forcing, Science. 290 (2000) 407a.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

L.B. Ekstrom, P.R. Roelfsema, J.T. Arsenault, G. Bonmassar, W. Vanduffel, Bottom-up dependent gating of frontal signals in early visual cortex, Science. 321 (2008) 414–417.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

D. Malcolm, The British and Irish Short Story Handbook, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2012.

An edited book

[1]

S. Plein, Cardiovascular MR Manual, Springer, London, 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

D. Al-Jumeily, S. Iram, A.J. Hussain, V. Francois-Benois, P. Fergus, Early Detection Method of Alzheimer’s Disease Using EEG Signals, in: D.-S. Huang, K. Han, M. Gromiha (Eds.), Intelligent Computing in Bioinformatics: 10th International Conference, ICIC 2014, Taiyuan, China, August 3-6, 2014. Proceedings, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2014: pp. 25–33.

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 Progress in Natural Science: Materials International.

Blog post

[1]

A. Carpineti, Watch SpaceX’s Barge Landing In This Breathtaking 360 Video, IFLScience. (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/technology/space-x-barge-landing-breathtaking-360-view/ (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, Applying Agreed-Upon Procedures: Highway Trust Fund Excise Taxes, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2003.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

J. Schwartz, Essays on unemployment insurance and the business cycle, Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University, 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. Saslow, Village Moves to Deter Illegal Housing, New York Times. (2006) LI9.

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	Progress in Natural Science: Materials International
ISSN (print)	1002-0071
Scope