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

J. Paulsson, Summing up the noise in gene networks, Nature 427(6973), 415–418 (2004).

A journal article with 2 authors

S. Hoppins and J. Nunnari, Cell Biology. Mitochondrial dynamics and apoptosis--the ER connection, Science 337(6098), 1052–1054 (2012).

A journal article with 3 authors

G. Giribet, G.D. Edgecombe, and W.C. Wheeler, Arthropod phylogeny based on eight molecular loci and morphology, Nature 413(6852), 157–161 (2001).

A journal article with 7 or more authors

F.I. Valiyaveetil, M. Leonetti, T.W. Muir, and R. Mackinnon, Ion selectivity in a semisynthetic K+ channel locked in the conductive conformation, Science 314(5801), 1004–1007 (2006).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

R. Boero, Behavioral Computational Social Science (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2015).

An edited book

R.V. West and A.C. Colvin (eds.), The Patellofemoral Joint in the Athlete (Springer, New York, NY, 2014).

A chapter in an edited book

L. Guo-zhi, Z. Ting-an, K. Xian-yao, et al., Research on Mechanically Activated Digestion Performance of Diasporic Bauxite and Kinetics, in Light Metals 2012, edited by C.E. Suarez (Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016), pp. 21–26.

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

J. Fang, What Can Senior Citizen Slugs Teach Us About Age-Related Memory Loss?, IFLScience (2015).

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, FAA’s Implementation of a Performance Standard for Passenger Screening Process (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1987).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

J. Voss, Supported housing program for severely mentally ill homeless individuals: A grant proposal (Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2013).

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

B. Rothenberg, No. 1 Ranking in Hand, Pliskova Aims for a Major Title, New York Times B10 (2017).

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

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