How to format your references using the EPL citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for EPL. 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]

Madden J D 2007 Mobile robots: motor challenges and materials solutions Science 318 1094–7

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Schoelkopf R J and Girvin S M 2008 Wiring up quantum systems Nature 451 664–9

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Eerenstein W, Mathur N D and Scott J F 2006 Multiferroic and magnetoelectric materials Nature 442 759–65

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Becker L, Poreda R J, Hunt A G, Bunch T E and Rampino M 2001 Impact event at the Permian-Triassic boundary: evidence from extraterrestrial noble gases in fullerenes Science 291 1530–3

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Rigby K A 2013 Aircraft Systems Integration of Air-Launched Weapons (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

[1]

Cuevas-Maraver J, Kevrekidis P G and Williams F 2014 The sine-Gordon Model and its Applications: From Pendula and Josephson Junctions to Gravity and High-Energy Physics vol 10 (Cham: Springer International Publishing)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Ni W and Wu W 2014 A Message Efficient Intersection Control Algorithm Based on VANETs Internet of Vehicles – Technologies and Services: First International Conference, IOV, Beijing, China, September 1-3, 2014. Proceedings Lecture Notes in Computer Science ed R C-H Hsu and S Wang (Cham: Springer International Publishing) pp 31–41

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 EPL.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew D 2017 The Daily Life Of A Neanderthal Revealed From The Gunk In Their Teeth 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 1976 USDA Proposal To Acquire Automatic Data Processing Equipment (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]

Williamson K M 2010 The effects of communist policies, the democratic transition, and EU accession on gender equality in Germany and the Czech Republic Doctoral dissertation (Washington, DC: George Washington University)

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]

Walsh M W 2010 Eugene R. Anderson, 82; He Made Insurers Pay Up New York Times A17

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	EPL
Abbreviation	EPL
ISSN (print)	0295-5075
ISSN (online)	1286-4854
Scope	General Physics and Astronomy