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

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

G. Gilmore, Astronomy. How cold is cold dark matter?, Science 322 (2008) 1476–1477.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

G. Fritz, P.M.H. Kroneck, MICROBIOLOGY. Sulfate to go, Science 350 (2015) 1476–1477.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

T.A. Ofstad, C.S. Zuker, M.B. Reiser, Visual place learning in Drosophila melanogaster, Nature 474 (2011) 204–207.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Z.-Y. Li, Y.-Z. Wang, L.-M. He, H.-J. Zheng, Metabolic profiles of prokaryotic and eukaryotic communities in deep-sea sponge Neamphius huxleyi [corrected]. indicated by metagenomics, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 3895.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

F.-S. Lhabitant, Hedge Funds, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Oxford, UK, 2004.

An edited book

[1]

B. Peleg, Strategic Social Choice: Stable Representations of Constitutions, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

B. Otjacques, M. Noirhomme, F. Feltz, Innovative Visualization Tools to Monitor Scientific Cooperative Activities, in: Y. Luo (Ed.), Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering: 4th International Conference, CDVE 2007, Shanghai, China, September 16-20, 2007. Proceedings, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007: pp. 33–41.

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 Sustainability.

Blog post

[1]

T. Hale, Two Of The World’s Rarest Tigers Have Been Born At London Zoo, IFLScience (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/two-of-the-worlds-rarest-tigers-have-been-born-at-london-zoo/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Airspace Use: FAA Needs to Improve Its Management of Special Use Airspace, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1988.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

D.G. Hilmey, Synthesis and Study of Heteroatomic Spirocyclic Scaffolds, Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2006.

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. Wagner, Mets’ Pitching Coach Offers Wisdom and Wit, New York Times (2017) D6.

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 Sustainability
ISSN (print)	2589-2347
Scope