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

Macilwain C. Human cloning claim sparks fear of Senate backlash. Nature. 2003;421(6918):3.

A journal article with 2 authors

Estrin D, Sim I. Health care delivery. Open mHealth architecture: an engine for health care innovation. Science. 2010;330(6005):759-760.

A journal article with 3 authors

Smothers JF, Henikoff S, Carter P. Tech.Sight. Phage display. Affinity selection from biological libraries. Science. 2002;298(5593):621-622.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

McKinney JD, Höner zu Bentrup K, Muñoz-Elías EJ, et al. Persistence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in macrophages and mice requires the glyoxylate shunt enzyme isocitrate lyase. Nature. 2000;406(6797):735-738.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Nicholls DL, Piergrossi JC, Gibertoni C de S, Daniel MA. Psychoanalytic Thinking in Occupational Therapy. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2013.

An edited book

Amyot D, Williams AW, eds. System Analysis and Modeling: 4th International SDL and MSC Workshop, SAM 2004, Ottawa, Canada, June 1-4, 2004, Revised Selected Papers. Vol 3319. Springer; 2005.

A chapter in an edited book

Daniels JM, Shinavier B. The Hand and Wrist. In: Daniels J, Hoffman MR, eds. Common Musculoskeletal Problems: A Handbook. Springer; 2011:33-41.

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 Medical Physics.

Blog post

Andrew D. Will AI Ever Understand Human Emotions? IFLScience. January 10, 2017. Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/will-ai-ever-understand-human-emotions/

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. NASA 5-Year Planning. U.S. Government Printing Office; 1992.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Kratchman J. Predicting Chronic Non-Cancer Toxicity Levels from Short-Term Toxicity Data. Doctoral dissertation. George Washington University; 2017.

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

Vecsey G. Faces Change for Yanks, but Postseason Focus Doesn’t. New York Times. October 7, 2010:B17.

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
ISSN (online)	2473-4209
Scope	General Medicine