How to format your references using the Materials Today Physics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Materials Today Physics. 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]

S.S. Renner, Evolution. Living fossil younger than thought, Science 334 (2011) 766–767.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Q. Liu, Z. Paroo, Molecular biology. Dicer’s cut and switch, Science 328 (2010) 314–315.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

J. Reinhard, M.V. Srinivasan, S. Zhang, Olfaction: scent-triggered navigation in honeybees, Nature 427 (2004) 411.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

H.A. Fricker, T. Scambos, R. Bindschadler, L. Padman, An active subglacial water system in West Antarctica mapped from space, Science 315 (2007) 1544–1548.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

G. Zarbock, S. Lynch, A. Ammann, S. Ringer, Mindfulness for Therapists, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2014.

An edited book

[1]

L. Dybkjær, W. Minker, eds., Recent Trends in Discourse and Dialogue, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2008.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

M. Missbach, J. Stelzel, C. Gardiner, G. Anderson, M. Tempes, Change and Configuration Management, in: J. Stelzel, C. Gardiner, G. Anderson, M. Tempes (Eds.), SAP on the Cloud, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013: pp. 83–100.

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 Today Physics.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Flat Battery? New Prototype Turns Waste Heat Into Electricity, 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, Legality of the Reported Use by the Energy Research and Development Administration of Certain Fossil Energy Funds for Contracts, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1976.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

D.M. Cappiello, Minding the gap: Western export controls and soviet technology policy during the 1960s, Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2010.

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]

J. Silver-Greenberg, B. Protess, M. Corkery, Deal With Saudis Underlines Benefits of Backing President, New York Times (2017) A1.

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 Today Physics
ISSN (print)	2542-5293
Scope