How to format your references using the Materials Research Express citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Materials Research 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

[1]

La Thangue N B 2002 Transcription. Chromatin control--a place for E2F and Myc to meet Science 296 1034–5

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Shinnar R and Citro F 2006 Energy. A road map to U.S. decarbonization Science 313 1243–4

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Halazonetis T D, Gorgoulis V G and Bartek J 2008 An oncogene-induced DNA damage model for cancer development Science 319 1352–5

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Lin Q-Y, Mason J A, Li Z, Zhou W, O’Brien M N, Brown K A, Jones M R, Butun S, Lee B, Dravid V P, Aydin K and Mirkin C A 2018 Building superlattices from individual nanoparticles via template-confined DNA-mediated assembly Science 359 669–72

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Schroeder K, Thompson T, Frith K and Pencheon D 2012 Sustainable Healthcare (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

[1]

Shafer W M 2006 Antimicrobial Peptides and Human Disease vol 306 (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Lundgren U P 2012 Education and the Welfare Society Enlightenment, Creativity and Education: Polities, Politics, Performances ed L Wikander, C Gustafsson and U Riis (Rotterdam: SensePublishers) pp 61–77

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 Research Express.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew E 2015 What Lies Behind The Hype And The Hope Of Stem Cell Research And Therapy IFLScience

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 2003 Information Technology: Leadership Remains Key to Agencies Making Progress on Enterprise Architecture Efforts (Washington, DC: 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

[1]

Rawashdeh M Y 2013 A Relational Framework for Clustering and Cluster Validity and the Generalization of the Silhouette Measure Doctoral dissertation (Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati)

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]

Gregory Mankiw N 2015 A Slippery New Rule for Gauging Fiscal Policy New York Times BU7

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 Research Express
ISSN (online)	2053-1591
Scope