How to format your references using the Surface Science citation style

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

[1]

J. Downward, Signal transduction. Prelude to an anniversary for the RAS oncogene, Science 314 (2006) 433–434.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

A. Ganachaud, C. Wunsch, Improved estimates of global ocean circulation, heat transport and mixing from hydrographic data, Nature 408 (2000) 453–457.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

D. Dahal, S. Liu, J. Oeding, The carbon cycle and hurricanes in the United States between 1900 and 2011, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 5197.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

J. Zheng, K. Kwak, J. Asbury, X. Chen, I.R. Piletic, M.D. Fayer, Ultrafast dynamics of solute-solvent complexation observed at thermal equilibrium in real time, Science 309 (2005) 1338–1343.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

B.M. Tissue, Basics of Analytical Chemistry and Chemical Equilibria, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2013.

An edited book

[1]

B. Leibe, J. Matas, N. Sebe, M. Welling, eds., Computer Vision – ECCV 2016: 14th European Conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 11-14, 2016, Proceedings, Part II, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

J.C. Carmichael, M.J. Stamos, Right Hemicolectomy and Ileocecectomy: Laparoscopic Approach, in: O. Bardakcioglu (Ed.), Advanced Techniques in Minimally Invasive and Robotic Colorectal Surgery, Springer US, Boston, MA, 2015: pp. 37–48.

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 Surface Science.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, NASA Reveals Latest Warp-Drive Ship Designs, IFLScience (2014).

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, Abstracts of Reports and Testimony: Fiscal Year 2000, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2001.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Z. Eldridge, The Empowerment of a Forgotten Population, Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University, 2017.

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. Yablonsky, The Hebrew School, New York Times (2008) M280.

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	Surface Science
Abbreviation	Surf. Sci.
ISSN (print)	0039-6028
Scope	Materials Chemistry Surfaces, Coatings and Films Condensed Matter Physics Surfaces and Interfaces