ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication
- contains information on citing in ACS Style, in addition to information on writing and publishing in the field of chemistry, and more. It is available in digital format only, through the Libraries. Go to this page https://bit.ly/2Ocjwfp and under Full Text Availability, click where it says ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication. You will need to be logged in to view the book chapters. The chapter on citations is 4.3 References.
The official Quick Guide to ACS Style is located here: https://pubs-acs-org.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/doi/full/10.1021/acsguide.40303
The ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication replaces the ACS Style Guide.
Formatting citations
Note that the journal name is abbreviated for ACS Style citations. These abbreviations can be found in the Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index or CASSI, which is available in the library. A search tool is also available online. For a core list of journal abbreviations, see this link from CAS. (Use the journal abbreviation under the journal title, not the CODEN. For example, ACS Catal. for the journal ACS Catalysis, not ACCACS.)
The following example of a citation for a journal article is taken from the ACS Style Quick Guide. Bolding, italics, and punctuation are all important.
For an article from an online journal:
Foster, J. C.; Varlas, S.; Couturaud, B.; Coe, J.; O’Reilly, R. K. Getting into Shape: Reflections on a New Generation of Cylindrical Nanostructures’ Self-Assembly Using Polymer Building Block. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2019, 141 (7), 2742−2753. DOI: 10.1021/jacs.8b08648
Notes:
Some publications list the first 10 authors followed by a semi-colon and et. al.; check the guidelines (from the ACS Style Guide).
The journal Biochemistry is an exception. Consult this journal’s instructions to authors for the correct format. Refer to the style guide for differences between online and print sources.
When using ACS Style, if you have any questions you should refer to the ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication, Chapter 4, References.
What is the difference between an Index and a Database?
An index contains citation information about an item (books, articles, or other kinds of documents). This includes the title, authors, year of publication, journal name and pages, and usually an abstract. It does not contain full text of the article. SciFinder is an index; when you get full text it is actually coming from the Libraries' journal subscriptions.
A database usually contains the full text of the article or other document, in addition to the bibliographic information listed above. It is a generic term that refers to a collection of digital information that can be searched or queried. The term database may sometimes be used to refer to an index.