ACS Paper Format: Your Perfect Handbook

What Is ACS Paper Format?

Your academic writing will be expected to be written in a specific style according to the subject that you are writing within and even the university that you are attending. ACS paper format is the American Chemical Society’s writing style and is widely used with papers that are written in Chemistry. Submitting work in which you have incorrectly used formatting can easily cause your writing to be rejected. People have addressed our academic proofreading services many times after their whole work was rejected because of incorrect formatting.

How to Format Your Pages for ACS

ACS format does specify specific layouts for your pages, however, the following guidance can be used as good practice. However always consult your supervisor for any specific directions:

• Font: for the main body of your writing you should always use an easy to read fonts such as Times New Roman or Arial in 12pt size.
• Margins: These should be set at 1” on all sides of the paper.
• Spacing: this should be set to double spacing throughout.
• Hanging indent: this should be 0.5” for your works cited page.

ACS in Text Citations

Within ACS style there are 3 possible ways for you to provide an in-text citation:

• By reference number (italics): The process for this has already been previously described (1).
• Through Superscript: The process for this has already been previously described1.
• Through Author and Date: The process for this has already been previously described (Author, 2012).

When references are repeated reuse the original number rather than allocating a new number, otherwise each reference should be done sequentially. With author name citations where there are two names both should be used; (Author A and Author B, 2012). For multiple authors use the first name followed by “et al.”; (Author A et al., 2015)

Bibliography ACS Style

The actual citations should be arranged within the bibliography at the end of your paper. If you have numbered them then they should be arranged in numerical order as used within your paper. If you have used the author style then they should be arranged in alphabetical order.

ACS Style Citation Formats

The following are how to format the different types of citations in ACS style that you may be required to make within your paper:

Format for a book with one or more authors:

• Author, First Initial. Second Initial.; Author, A. B. The Book Title (in italics), The Edition (if any); The Publisher: The Place of Publication, Year Published; Pagination.
• Smith, A. B.; Jones, X. Y. Book on Chemistry: Best Practice; Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1978.

Note: some ACS publications require the chapter title in book references. Pagination is not included if the whole book is being referenced. If there is no author then they are simply omitted and you start with the volume title.

Book with editors:

• Editor, A. A., Editor, B. B., Editor, C. C., Eds. Book Title (italics); Series Information (if any, including series number); Publisher: Place of Publication, Year.
• Smith, A. B.; Jones, X. Y., Eds. Another Book on Chemistry: Best Practice; Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1985.

Referencing a journal article:

• Author, A. A; Author, B. B; Author, C. C. Title of Article. Journal Abbreviation (italics) [Online if online] Year (boldface), Volume (italics), Pagination.
• Smith, A.; Jones, B. C. An Article on Chemistry.  J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1965, 91, 4634-4639.

Note: Journal sources are always abbreviated such as:

• J. Am. Chem. Soc. – Journal of the American Chemical Society
• J. Phys. Chem. A – Journal of Physical Chemistry
• Phys. Rev. Lett. – Physical Review Letters

Website citations:

• Author, A. A. (if any). Title of Site. URL (accessed date), other identifying information. (No need to include URL of subscription sites).
• American Chemical Society Homepage. https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en.html (Accessed Jan 1, 2017)

We Can Overcome Difficulties with Formatting in ACS Style

As can be seen with the examples above it would be very easy to miss out a comma or period within your citation or to simply enter information in the incorrect order. Remembering exactly how to do your formatting is not easy.

This is why you may want to use our professional formatting and editing services. Our experts are all higher degree qualified in the areas in which they provide support. This ensures that you will always work with someone that can understand not only the formatting required but also your work itself. All of the help that we provide is unique and thoroughly proofread by a certified professional to ensure that it is correct.

Ensure that your ACS paper format is perfect by entrusting this task to our qualified experts!