ACS Style Guide - References

This guide is currently being updated to reflect the revised version of this chapter that was released on April 8, 2025. 

Based on:

Vogel, T. M.; Cardinal, S. K.; Wrublewski, D.; Butkovich, N.; Baysinger, G. References. The ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication; Banik, G. M., Baysinger, G., Kamat, P. V., Pienta, N. J., Eds.; American Chemical Society, revised April 8, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsguide.40300

The guide is IP-restricted, but the Quick Guide (4.3.3) is open access.

Some of the changes and/or additions in the April 2025 revision:

• Journal titles do not have to be abbreviated. However, the references list should be consistent (all abbreviations or all complete titles)
• The DOIs at the end of the references can be formatted as URLs, so DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c00925 (or DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c00925) can be written as https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c00925
• Changing the capitalization within the titles is optional. You can change them all to sentence case, change them to headline case, or leave them as is. Publishers use different capitalization styles, the reference managers may not correct them perfectly, and manually changing them increases the likelihood of errors. What is important:
  • Words that are capitalized (names, places, genera, scientific processes, etc.) should remain capitalized regardless.
  • Any punctuation, italics, superscripts, subscripts, greek symbols, chemical formulas, etc.) should match the original title. This additional formatting can be stripped of the references when imported into a reference manager, so you need to check them and correct if necessary. 
• Online resources do not need access dates by default. The date doesn't matter if a) the page changes or disappears, and it's not archived in the Wayback Machine, or b) the source is generated content that cannot be replicated (e.g. GenAI). Use your best judgement.