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]

Zuk M 2010 Evolution. Dance like no one is watching, sing like no one is listening? Science 328 1237–8

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Zens M S and Webb C O 2002 Ecology. Sizing up the shape of life Science 295 1475–6

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Nabel G J, Wolinsky S M and Haynes B F 2012 Retrospective. Norman L. Letvin (1949-2012) Science 336 1653

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

He Y, Hashimoto M, Song D, Chen S-D, He J, Vishik I M, Moritz B, Lee D-H, Nagaosa N, Zaanen J, Devereaux T P, Yoshida Y, Eisaki H, Lu D H and Shen Z-X 2018 Rapid change of superconductivity and electron-phonon coupling through critical doping in Bi-2212 Science 362 62–5

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Askoolum A 2007 System Building with APL + Win (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

[1]

Poveda R L 2016 Carbon Nanofiber Reinforced Polymer Composites ed N Gupta (Cham: Springer International Publishing)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Tronco T R, Tome T, Rothenberg C E, Ongarelli M A and Rego A C B 2010 Scenarios of Evolution for a Future Internet Architecture New Network Architectures: The Path to the Future Internet Studies in Computational Intelligence ed T Tronco (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer) pp 57–77

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]

Andrew E 2014 Scientist Creates Diamonds From Peanut Butter 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 2014 Highway Trust Fund: DOT Has Opportunities to Improve Tracking and Reporting of Highway Spending (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]

Messian N M 2012 The Spiral of Time: A Path to the Soul—Jewish Mystical and Depth Psychological Perspectives Doctoral dissertation (Carpinteria, CA: Pacifica Graduate Institute)

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]

Billard M 2010 Shop Till You’re Thirsty New York Times E6

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)