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]

Smaglik P 2005 The places to be Nature 433 551

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Soubeyrand B and Plotkin S A 2002 Microbial evolution: antitoxin vaccines and pathogen virulence Nature 417 609–10; discussion 610

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Rudolph M L, Lekić V and Lithgow-Bertelloni C 2015 Viscosity jump in Earth’s mid-mantle Science 350 1349–52

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Shaffer S M, Dunagin M C, Torborg S R, Torre E A, Emert B, Krepler C, Beqiri M, Sproesser K, Brafford P A, Xiao M, Eggan E, Anastopoulos I N, Vargas-Garcia C A, Singh A, Nathanson K L, Herlyn M and Raj A 2018 Corrigendum: Rare cell variability and drug-induced reprogramming as a mode of cancer drug resistance Nature 555 274

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Alberts B, Johnson A, Lewis J, Morgan D, Raff M, Roberts K and Walter P 2017 Molekularbiologie der Zelle (Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA)

An edited book

[1]

Hamm C 2015 Evolution of Lightweight Structures: Analyses and Technical Applications vol 6 (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Buldas A and Laur S 2006 Do Broken Hash Functions Affect the Security of Time-Stamping Schemes? Applied Cryptography and Network Security: 4th International Conference, ACNS 2006, Singapore, June 6-9, 2006. Proceedings Lecture Notes in Computer Science ed J Zhou, M Yung and F Bao (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer) pp 50–65

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]

Hale T 2016 Over 300 Reindeer Struck Dead By Lightning In Norway 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 1982 Strong Central Management of Office Automation Will Boost Productivity (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]

Perfitt T 2009 Megaphone: Fault tolerant, scalable, and trustworthy peer-to-peer microblogging 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]

Hollander S 2002 Princeton’s Atkinson Won’t Let Injuries Stop Him New York Times D3

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

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