How to format your references using the Medical Physics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Medical 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	Download the output style file
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

S.E. Offerman, Materials science. Microstructures in 4D, Science 305(5681), 190–191 (2004).

A journal article with 2 authors

P.J. Enyeart and A.D. Ellington, Synthetic biology: a yeast for all reasons, Nature 477(7365), 413–414 (2011).

A journal article with 3 authors

W.M. Shih, J.D. Quispe, and G.F. Joyce, A 1.7-kilobase single-stranded DNA that folds into a nanoscale octahedron, Nature 427(6975), 618–621 (2004).

A journal article with 7 or more authors

K. Kameyama, Y. Kishi, M. Yoshimura, N. Kanzawa, M. Sameshima, and T. Tsuchiya, Tyrosine phosphorylation in plant bending, Nature 407(6800), 37 (2000).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

F.B. Saksena, Color Atlas of Local and Systemic Signs of Cardiovascular Disease (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK, 2008).

An edited book

S.G. Davison, Green-Function Theory of Chemisorption (Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2006).

A chapter in an edited book

S.A. Mitchell and R.A. Meals, Surgical Options for Failed Thumb Basal Joint Arthroplasty, in Reoperative Hand Surgery, edited by S.F.M. Duncan (Springer, New York, NY, 2012), pp. 67–77.

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 Medical Physics.

Blog post

D. Andrew, Climate Change Is Affecting All Life On Earth – And That’s Not Good News For Humanity, IFLScience (2016).

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

Government Accountability Office, International Space Station: Significant Challenges May Limit Onboard Research (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2009).

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

C.E. Schlumbrecht, Do Negative Experiences Influence Substance Use in Adolescent Males and Females? (Doctoral dissertation, University of Louisiana, 2015).

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

G.G. Gustines, Super Powers: Turning a Dime Into a Million Bucks, New York Times WK2 (2010).

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

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	Medical Physics
Abbreviation	Med. Phys.
ISSN (print)	0094-2405
Scope	General Medicine