How to format your references using the Soft Matter citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Soft 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	Download the output style file
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

A. C. Kummel, Science, 2003, 302, 69–70.

A journal article with 2 authors

R. Apps and M. Carrington, Science, 2013, 341, 1175.

A journal article with 3 authors

S. Xiao, C. Zhou and X. Yuan, Nature, 2007, 446, E9-10; discussion E10-1.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

I. Chuine, P. Yiou, N. Viovy, B. Seguin, V. Daux and E. Le Roy Ladurie, Nature, 2004, 432, 289–290.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

G. T. Barrett-Lennard, The Relationship Inventory, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2014.

An edited book

D. K. Maheshwari, Ed., Bacterial Metabolites in Sustainable Agroecosystem, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015, vol. 12.

A chapter in an edited book

M. Katz and I. Shaikovsky, in Practical RichFaces, ed. I. Shaikovsky, Apress, Berkeley, CA, 2011, pp. 85–94.

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 Soft Matter.

Blog post

S. Luntz, The Secret Of The Amazing Rising Island Revealed, https://www.iflscience.com/environment/the-secret-of-the-amazing-rising-island-revealed/, (accessed 30 October 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, The Excepted Service: A Research Profile, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1997.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

M. Machula, Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University, 2014.

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

L. Saslow, New York Times, 2007, LI2.

In-text citations

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

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	Soft Matter
Abbreviation	Soft Matter
ISSN (print)	1744-683X
ISSN (online)	1744-6848
Scope	General Chemistry Condensed Matter Physics