How to format your references using the Materials Express citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Materials Express. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

S. Gille, 2014. Oceanography. How ice shelves melt. Science (New York, N.Y.), 346(6214), pp. 1180–1181.

A journal article with 2 authors

A. M. Hetherington and F. I. Woodward, 2003. The role of stomata in sensing and driving environmental change. Nature, 424(6951), pp. 901–908.

A journal article with 3 authors

J. X. Mitrovica, N. Gomez and P. U. Clark, 2009. The sea-level fingerprint of West Antarctic collapse. Science (New York, N.Y.), 323(5915), p. 753.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

U. S. Dinish, G. Balasundaram, Y.-T. Chang and M. Olivo, 2014. Actively targeted in vivo multiplex detection of intrinsic cancer biomarkers using biocompatible SERS nanotags. Scientific reports, 4, p. 4075.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

M. C. Smith and D. M. Sherman, 2009. Goat Medicine. Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

X. Wang, 2015. Traceback and Anonymity. Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

H. Garcia-Molina, 2008. in On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2008: OTM 2008 Confederated International Conferences, CoopIS, DOA, GADA, IS, and ODBASE 2008, Monterrey, Mexico, November 9-14, 2008, Proceedings, Part I, edited by R. Meersman and Z. Tari, Springer, pp. 7–7.

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 Materials Express.

Blog post

S. Luntz, 2014. 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

Government Accountability Office, 2014. Space Acquisitions: Acquisition Management Continues to Improve but Challenges Persist for Current and Future Programs. U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

J. Kramer-Duffield, 2010. Beliefs and Uses of Tagging among Undergraduates, Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina.

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. Baker, 2007. New York Times BU15 (2007).

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	Materials Express
ISSN (print)	2158-5849
ISSN (online)	2158-5857
Scope