Please note, these guidelines are relevant to all of our journals. Make sure that you check your chosen journal’s web pages for specific guidelines too.
This guide is designed to give you advice on how to format your bibliographic references, notes and footnotes using our house style.
Referencing your work clearly and accurately is incredibly important. Referencing acknowledges the work of others, and highlights the range and types of your cited material. Good referencing is an important part of a work’s presentation, and can affect how others view it. Failing to reference clearly could have a negative impact on your work if people can’t find the original material, or even be seen as plagiarism.
We have a specific referencing style that we use across all our journals, as it ensures that all references are given accurately, clearly and with sufficient detail. Using our style in your own work will ensure that your references meet a professional standard, and that anyone evaluating your work will be able to see how you have used other people’s work to develop your own. It’s worth checking with your university department what referencing style they recommend and if they have specific guidelines they want you to follow.
We encourage the citation of primary research over review articles, where appropriate, in order to give credit to those who first reported a finding. This is part of our commitment to the principles of San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).
We will format your content according to our house style before publication; however, it’s important you use Vancouver style (not Harvard style) for all journals except Chemistry Education Research and Practice, which requires the use of Harvard referencing.
Referencing in the text
Use superscript numbers to show the reference source of statements in the text – for example, reactive small molecule species.3 Usually these should appear at the end of the sentence (after the punctuation), but can be after the relevant word or compound. The reference numbers should be cited in the correct sequence through the text (including those in tables and figure captions, numbered according to where the table or figure is designated to appear).
If a statement has multiple references you should reference all of the citations in the text. If you have two citations, or if you have more than two and the numbers are not consecutive, use commas (with no spaces) between numbers, examples: 12,13 or 12,14,15. If there are more than two numbers and they are consecutive, use an en-dash to separate the first and last citation – for example, 14–20.
The author(s) can be mentioned at their first citation in the text, but initials are not necessary. For papers with one or two authors simply state the surname(s), and for papers with three or more authors you should use the first author’s surname followed by et al.
Listing your references
The references themselves are listed in numerical order at the end of the main article. The names and initials of all authors should be given in the reference. Please note, references cited in the electronic supplementary information (ESI) should be included in a separate references list within the ESI document.
Journal articles
The journal abbreviations to be used in Royal Society of Chemistry publications are defined in Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index (CASSI). If you cannot find a recognised abbreviation for a journal and it is not obvious how the title should be abbreviated, please cite the full journal title.
Journal articles should be cited in the form:
A. Name, B. Name and C. Name, Journal Title, year, volume, page.
Inclusion of article title is optional for most journals, but required for Food & Function, Inorganic Chemistry Frontiers, Materials Chemistry Frontiers, Organic Chemistry Frontiers and Industrial Chemistry & Materials.
When page numbers are not yet known, articles should be cited by DOI (Digital Object Identifier) – for example, T. J. Hebden, R. R. Schrock, M. K. Takase and P. Müller, Chem. Commun., 2012, DOI: 10.1039/C2CC17634C.
Books
A. Name, B. Name and C. Name, Book Title, Publisher, Publisher Location, year. For example, S T Beckett, Science of Chocolate, Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, 2000. If you are referencing published conference proceedings, these should be cited like a book.
Book chapters
A. Name, in Book Title, ed. Editor Name(s), Publisher, Publisher Location, edition, year, chapter, pages. The ‘ed.’ in the example above stands for ‘edited by’, that is, the editor(s) of the book; if the book has no editors this can be left out.
Theses
A. Name, PhD thesis, University Name, year.
Lectures, meetings & conferences
A. Name, presented in part at Conference Title, Place, Month, year.
Reference to unpublished material
If you reference unpublished material in your article you must provide the editor with copies of the manuscripts with your submission. You should not reference unpublished work without the permission of those who completed the work.
For material accepted for publication, but not yet published: A. Name, Journal Title, in press. For material submitted for publication, but not yet accepted: A. Name, Journal Title, submitted. For material that has yet to be submitted for publication: A. Name, unpublished work.
Online resources (including databases, websites & wikis)
Name of resource, URL, (accessed date). Please note the most important information to include is the URL and the date accessed. For example, The Merck Index Online, http://www.rsc.org/Merck-Index/monograph/mono1500000841, (accessed October 2013).
Preprint servers (for example, ChemRxiv, arXiv)
ChemRxiv & bioRxiv: The citation should include the author(s), the name of the preprint server, the year, the word “preprint” and the DOI (including version number).
S. Bhattacharjee, S. P. Chaudhary and S. Bhattacharyya, ChemRxiv, 2019, preprint, DOI: 10.26434/chemrxiv.9794270.v1
arXiv: The citation should include the author(s), the name of the preprint server, the year, the article number and the url (including version number).
D. Carrascal, L. Fernandez and J. Ferrer, arXiv, 2009, preprint, arXiv:0904.1138, https://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1138v1
Patents
You should provide the name of the patentee(s), patent issuer, patent number and year. For example: J. C. Chung, US Pat., 20100105549A1, 2010; Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, Jpn. Pat., 2013034915A, 2013.
Software
T. Bellander, M. Lewne and B. Brunekreef, GAUSSIAN 3 (Revision B.05), Gaussian Inc., Pittsburgh, PA, 2003.
Using notes and footnotes
Notes are used to provide information that is not suitable for inclusion in the main body of the text. The information is still important in qualifying or amplifying the argument in the text, but is not normally included because it would disrupt the flow of the text – for example, additional experimental details.
Information included as Notes (end-notes) relating to the main text should appear at the end of the article, just above the references. Notes should be numbered using the same numbering system as the references. These might include:
- comments relevant to but not central to the matter under discussion
- limited experimental and spectral data
- crystallographic data
Footnotes are referred to with the following symbols: †, ‡, §, ¶, ║ etc. They refer to information such as authors’ contributions, acknowledgements or references to the Electronic Supplementary Information (ESI). It’s always worth checking if your university department allows footnotes or notes.
Reference management
You can automatically format references from your Endnote citation manager using our style files.
Free reference management programmes are available. Check with your university what reference management software they recommend or have available for you to use.
Using images and copyright
Any images that are used should be numerically referenced in the figure caption. If your work is solely for your course, and will not be published publically, you don’t need to obtain copyright permission.
If you are preparing an article to be published you will have to obtain copyright permission. The publisher/copyright owner of the inage will need to be contacted and asked for their process for receiving permission requests. Permission is acknowledged in the figure caption and some organisations will require the permission statement to be given exactly as they specify. An example permission statement would be: Reproduced with permission from ref. reference number. Copyright year, Publisher. Find more information on our copyright and permissions processes.