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]

Heldmaier G 2011 Physiology. Life on low flame in hibernation Science 331 866–7

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Hellmann H and Estelle M 2002 Plant development: regulation by protein degradation Science 297 793–7

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Kaufman T C, Severson D W and Robinson G E 2002 The Anopheles genome and comparative insect genomics Science 298 97–8

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Zhou C, Cheng X, Zhao Q, Yan Y, Wang J and Huang J 2014 Self-assembly of channel type β-CD dimers induced by dodecane Sci. Rep. 4 7533

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Pasternak J J 2005 An Introduction to Human Molecular Genetics (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

[1]

Sutter-Dallay A-L, Glangeaud-Freudenthal N M-C, Guedeney A and Riecher-Rössler A 2016 Joint Care of Parents and Infants in Perinatal Psychiatry (Cham: Springer International Publishing)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Rines H W, Molnar S J, Tinker N A and Phillips R L 2006 Oat Cereals and Millets Genome Mapping and Molecular Breeding in Plants ed C Kole (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer) pp 211–42

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]

Hale T 2016 You Can Now Access All Of NASA’s Research Online For Free 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 1992 Tax Systems Modernization: Input Processing Strategy is Risky and Lacks a Sound Analytical Basis (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]

Alsaadi A 2016 Smart smoke and fire detection with wireless and global system for mobile technology Doctoral dissertation (Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach)

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]

Dynarski S 2014 Where College Ratings Hits the Wall New York Times BU7

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)