How to format your references using the SCIENCE CHINA Materials citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for SCIENCE CHINA Materials (SCM). 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

Smaglik P. Biologists officially welcome plan. Nature, 2001, 412: 665.

A journal article with 2 authors

Clements DH, Sarama J. Early childhood mathematics intervention. Science, 2011, 333: 968–970.

A journal article with 3 authors

Sasaki T, Matsuki N, Ikegaya Y. Action-potential modulation during axonal conduction. Science, 2011, 331: 599–601.

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Ye J, He W, Wu Q et al. Determination of magnetic anisotropy constants in Fe ultrathin film on vicinal Si(111) by anisotropic magnetoresistance. Sci Rep, 2013, 3: 2148.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Zepernick H-J, Finger A. Pseudo Random Signal Processing. West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons Ltd,., 2005.

An edited book

Lopes N. Machine Learning for Adaptive Many-Core Machines - A Practical Approach. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

Xie X, Li Y, Sun Y et al. Stem Cells and Hematopoietic Cell Engineering. In: Zhao RC, ed. Stem Cells: Basics and Clinical Translation. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2015: 111–144.

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 SCIENCE CHINA Materials.

Blog post

Davis J. Scientists Reprogram Skin Cells To Hunt Down And Shrink Brain Tumors. IFLScience 2017. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/scientists-reprogram-skin-cells-to-hunt-down-and-shrink-brain-tumors/.

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. Contracting Strategies: Better Data and Management Needed to Leverage Value of Interagency and Enterprisewide Contracts. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2010.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Pease M. Progress towards the Synthesis of a Potent, Bioavailable and Selective Dimethylarginine Dimethylaminohydrolase-1 Inactivator. 2014.

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

Johnson G. In Chernobyl, Life Finds a Way. New York Times 2015 D3.

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 [1,2,3,4].

About the journal

Full journal title	SCIENCE CHINA Materials
ISSN (print)	2095-8226
ISSN (online)	2199-4501
Scope