How to format your references using the Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical. 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]

Deming D 2015 Astronomy: A small star with an Earth-like planet Nature 527 169–70

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Crandall K A and Buhay J E 2004 Evolution. Genomic databases and the tree of life Science 306 1144–5

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Hautier Y, Niklaus P A and Hector A 2009 Competition for light causes plant biodiversity loss after eutrophication Science 324 636–8

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Ge X-T, Lei P, Wang H-C, Zhang A-L, Han Z-L, Chen X, Li S-H, Jiang R-C, Kang C-S and Zhang J-N 2014 miR-21 improves the neurological outcome after traumatic brain injury in rats Sci. Rep. 4 6718

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Balfour A 2012 Solomon’s Temple (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

[1]

Dastani M, El Fallah Seghrouchni A, Ricci A and Winikoff M 2008 Programming Multi-Agent Systems: 5th International Workshop, ProMAS 2007 Honolulu, HI, USA, May 15, 2007 Revised and Invited Papers vol 4908 (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Glare T R 2009 Use of Pathogens for Eradication of Exotic Lepidopteran Pests in New Zealand Use of Microbes for Control and Eradication of Invasive Arthropods ed A E Hajek, T R Glare and M O’Callaghan (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands) pp 49–69

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 Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew E 2015 Wolves, Boar And Other Wildlife Defy Contamination To Make A Comeback At Chernobyl 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 2002 Information Technology: Enterprise Architecture Use Across the Federal Government Can Be Improved (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]

Hebbard M T 2015 A Depositional Analysis of the Reeves Sand in Beauregard and Allen Parishes, Louisiana Doctoral dissertation ( Lafayette, LA: University of Louisiana)

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]

Schmidt M S 2017 Trump Appealed to Comey to Halt Inquiry Into Aide New York Times A1

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	Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical
Abbreviation	J. Phys. A Math. Theor.
ISSN (print)	1751-8113
ISSN (online)	1751-8121
Scope	Mathematical Physics Modelling and Simulation Statistics and Probability General Physics and Astronomy Statistical and Nonlinear Physics