How to format your references using the Communications in Theoretical Physics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Communications in Theoretical Physics. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Find the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

[1]

Ludvigsson J F 2005 Recruiters and academia. Hard times for Swedish physician-researchers Nature 434 542

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Klug Boonstra S and Christensen P 2013 IBI series winner. Mars Student Imaging Project: real research by secondary students Science 339 920–1

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Bascom-Slack C A, Arnold A E and Strobel S A 2012 IBI series winner. Student-directed discovery of the plant microbiome and its products Science 338 485–6

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Colombani J, Bianchini L, Layalle S, Pondeville E, Dauphin-Villemant C, Antoniewski C, Carré C, Noselli S and Léopold P 2005 Antagonistic actions of ecdysone and insulins determine final size in Drosophila Science 310 667–70

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

[1]

Pasher E and Ronen T 2011 The Complete Guide to Knowledge Management (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

[1]

Cai Z, Li Z, Kang Z and Liu Y 2009 Advances in Computation and Intelligence: 4th International Symposium, ISICA 2009 Huangshi, China, Ocotober 23-25, 2009 Proceedings vol 5821 (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Adams J C, Brainerd W S, Hendrickson R A, Maine R E, Martin J T and Smith B T 2009 Declarations The Fortran 2003 Handbook: The Complete Syntax, Features and Procedures ed W S Brainerd, R A Hendrickson, R E Maine, J T Martin and B T Smith (London: Springer) pp 115–69

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Communications in Theoretical Physics.

Blog post

[1]

O`Callaghan J 2015 No, There’s Not A Bloody Pterosaur Flying Over Idaho IFLScience

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

[1]

Government Accountability Office 1973 Examination Into Certain Contract Costs for the E-2C Aircraft Program (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office)

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Emerson J D 2001 The Jambalaya That is My Brain Doctoral dissertation (Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati)

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

[1]

Prochnik G 2015 Days of Observance New York Times BR16

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Communications in Theoretical Physics
Abbreviation	Commun. Theor. Phys.
ISSN (print)	0253-6102
Scope	Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)