How to Cite Computational Materials Data in a Methods Section
The Problem With How We Cite Materials Data Most methods sections that reference Materials Project cite Jain et al. 2013 and stop. No database version. No property-specific methodology paper. No access date. A reviewer reading that citation cannot determine which release of the database was queried, which DFT methodology produced the values, or whether the data would still be retrievable today. This is not a discipline problem. Each provider publishes different citation requirements on different pages, in different formats. AFLOW’s citation guidance lives on its documentation page. Materials Project’s lives on a legacy URL. OQMD and JARVIS-DFT list theirs elsewhere. No standard exists, and journal guidelines have not caught up. ...