Chemistry
ACS Citation Generator
Create accurate ACS references for journal articles, books, chapters, patents and websites. Paste a DOI, ISBN, URL, or title to get started.
Based on The ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication
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ACS numbers sources in order of appearance
ACS journals accept three systems. The most common is a superscript number; italic numbers in parentheses on the line are the accepted alternative, and some journals use author and year.
- On the line
- (1)
- Superscript
- …reported.1
ACS citation examples by source type
The workhorse of ACS style. Authors are surname first and separated by semicolons, the journal abbreviation is italic, the year is bold and the volume is italic.
[1] Kroto, H. W.; Heath, J. R.; O'Brien, S. C.; Curl, R. F.; Smalley, R. E. C60: Buckminsterfullerene. Nature 1985, 318 (6042), 162–163. DOI: 10.1038/318162a0.
ACS names every author. There is no et al. cut-off the way IEEE and AMA have one.
[2] Lewis, G. N. The atom and the molecule. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1916, 38 (4), 762–785. DOI: 10.1021/ja02261a002.
The bold year and italic volume stay bold and italic even when nothing else does.
[3] Author, A. B.; Author, C. D. Title of Article. J. Abbrev. Title *YYYY, 12* (3), 100–110. DOI: 10.1021/xxxxxxx.
Add the issue in parentheses only when each issue restarts at page 1.
[4] Author, A. B.; Author, C. D. Title of Preprint. ChemRxiv, YYYY. DOI: 10.26434/chemrxiv-xxxxx (accessed YYYY-MM-DD).
Label it as a preprint so a reader knows it has not been peer reviewed.
Book titles are italic, the edition follows the title, and the publisher comes before the place: Publisher: City, Year.
[5] Atkins, P.; de Paula, J.; Keeler, J. Physical Chemistry, 11th ed.; Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2018.
[6] Title of Book; Editor, A. B., Ed.; Publisher: City, YYYY.
[7] Author, A. B. Title of Book; Series Title, Vol. 12; Publisher: City, YYYY.
Chapters take "In" before the italic book title, and the page range is written with pp and no full stop after it.
[8] Author, A. B. Title of Chapter. In Title of Book; Editor, C. D., Ed.; Publisher: City, YYYY; pp 100–125.
[9] Author, A. B. Title of Chapter. In Title of Book; Editor, C. D., Ed.; Series Title, Vol. 4; Publisher: City, YYYY; pp 100–125.
[10] Title of Entry. In Title of Reference Work, 3rd ed.; Publisher: City, YYYY; Vol. 2, pp 45–47.
Web sources end with the URL followed by the access date in parentheses, written in ISO order: (accessed 2026-08-15).
[11] National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST Chemistry WebBook. NIST Standard Reference Database Number 69. https://webbook.nist.gov/chemistry/ (accessed 2026-08-15).
Databases and standards bodies are printed as written, never inverted.
[12] Author, A. B. Title of Page. Site Name, Month DD, YYYY. https://example.com/page (accessed YYYY-MM-DD).
[13] Author, A. B. Name of Software, version 2.1; Publisher: City, YYYY. https://example.com/software (accessed YYYY-MM-DD).
Patents are routine sources in chemistry and have their own shape: inventors, title, patent number, then the issue date.
[14] Inventor, A. B.; Inventor, C. D. Title of Patent. U.S. Patent 9,876,543, Month DD, YYYY.
[15] Inventor, A. B. Title of Patent. U.S. Patent Application 2026/0123456, Month DD, YYYY.
[16] Inventor, A. B. Title of Patent. WO 2026/123456, Month DD, YYYY.
Theses name the degree, the awarding institution and the year. The title is not italicised.
[17] Author, A. B. Title of Dissertation. Ph.D. Dissertation, University Name, City, YYYY.
[18] Author, A. B. Title of Thesis. M.S. Thesis, University Name, City, YYYY.
[19] Author, A. B. Title of Dissertation. Ph.D. Dissertation, University Name, City, YYYY. https://example.com/thesis (accessed YYYY-MM-DD).
Build your ACS bibliography
- [1] Vaswani, A.; Shazeer, N.; Parmar, N.; Uszkoreit, J.; Jones, L.; Gomez, A. N.; Kaiser, L.; Polosukhin, I. Attention is all you need. Proc. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 2017, 30, 5998–6008.
- [2] He, K.; Zhang, X.; Ren, S.; Sun, J. Deep residual learning for image recognition. Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit. 2016, 770–778. DOI: 10.1109/CVPR.2016.90.
- [3] Jinek, M.; Chylinski, K.; Fonfara, I.; Hauer, M.; Doudna, J. A.; Charpentier, E. A programmable dual-RNA-guided DNA endonuclease in adaptive bacterial immunity. Science 2012, 337 (6096), 816–821. DOI: 10.1126/science.1225829.
- [4] Brown, T. B.; Mann, B.; Ryder, N.; Subbiah, M.; Kaplan, J.; Dhariwal, P.; Neelakantan, A. Language models are few-shot learners. Proc. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 2020, 33, 1877–1901.
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- Style-aware sorting Ordered and numbered for your style.
ACS citation rules at a glance
- Reference order Number sources by first appearance in the text, not alphabetically.
- In-text citations A superscript number, or an italic number in parentheses on the line. Pick one and keep it.
- Author names Surname first, then initials, with a semicolon between authors: Kroto, H. W.; Heath, J. R.
- Every author is named ACS has no et al. cut-off for the reference list. A twenty-author paper gets twenty names.
- Bold year, italic volume The publication year is bold and the volume is italic. This pairing is unique to ACS.
- Journal names Use the CASSI abbreviation: J. Am. Chem. Soc., Angew. Chem., Int. Ed.
Checked against the Based on The ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication · Last reviewed August 2026
Read our methodologyCommon ACS citation mistakes
- Leaving the year unbolded The bold year is the fastest way a chemistry reviewer spots a reference list that was formatted in another style.
- Truncating the author list with et al. That is AMA and IEEE behaviour. ACS reference lists name every author.
- Separating authors with commas Authors are separated by semicolons, because the names themselves already contain commas.
- Spelling journal names out in full Use the CASSI abbreviation. Full titles are corrected at proof stage, or rejected before it.
- Writing pp. in a chapter reference ACS writes pp with no full stop: ; pp 100–125.
- Giving a web source no access date The URL is followed by the date you consulted it, in ISO order: (accessed 2026-08-15).
ACS quick reference (one page, PDF)
Element order for every source type chemistry actually uses, including patents, plus the bold-and-italic rules and the CASSI abbreviations that come up most. Print it, or hand it to a lab group.
- Reference patterns for eight source types, patents included
- Which parts are bold, which are italic, and why it matters
- The three accepted in-text systems side by side
- CASSI abbreviations for the journals students cite most
ACS citation generator FAQ
Is this ACS citation generator free?
Yes. Generate, copy, save, and export ACS citations without signing up. There is no paid tier and no export limit.
How does an ACS in-text citation work?
ACS accepts a superscript number, an italic number in parentheses on the line, or author and year. Superscript numbers are the most common in ACS journals. Whichever you choose, sources are numbered in the order they first appear.
Does ACS use et al. in the reference list?
No. The reference list names every author, however many there are. Some individual journals allow et al. after ten names, so check the author guidelines for the journal you are submitting to.
Do I include article titles in ACS references?
The ACS Guide includes them and most journals now do too, but a few still omit article titles. Our generator includes the title; delete it if your target journal does not want it.
How do I cite a patent in ACS style?
Inventors, title, patent number, then the issue date: Inventor, A. B. Title of Patent. U.S. Patent 9,876,543, Month DD, YYYY. The patent tab shows applications and international patents too.
Where does the citation metadata come from?
Crossref for DOIs, Open Library for ISBNs, and PubMed for biomedical articles. Nothing is written by a language model, so a volume or page range is either verified or left blank for you to fill in. See our methodology.
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