How to format your references using the Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications. 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

[1]

J.E. Squires, Artificial blood, Science 295 (2002) 1002–1005.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

R.J. Pelham, F. Chang, Actin dynamics in the contractile ring during cytokinesis in fission yeast, Nature 419 (2002) 82–86.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

H. Zou, A. Zindler, Y. Niu, Constraints on melt movement beneath the East Pacific Rise from 230Th-238U disequilibrium, Science 295 (2002) 107–110.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

S. Törnroth-Horsefield, Y. Wang, K. Hedfalk, U. Johanson, M. Karlsson, E. Tajkhorshid, R. Neutze, P. Kjellbom, Structural mechanism of plant aquaporin gating, Nature 439 (2006) 688–694.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

R. Courant, E.J. McShane, Differential and Integral Calculus, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 1988.

An edited book

[1]

N. Mastorakis, A. Bulucea, G. Tsekouras, eds., Computational Problems in Science and Engineering, 1st ed. 2015, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

L. Yang, Y. Zhu, X. Ren, Y. Zhang, Multi-Spacecraft Coordinated Planning, in: Y. Zhu, X. Ren, Y. Zhang (Eds.), On-Orbit Operations Optimization: Modeling and Algorithms, Springer, New York, NY, 2014: pp. 91–112.

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 Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Titan’s Sunsets Give Insight To Hazy Atmospheres of Exoplanets, IFLScience (2014). https://www.iflscience.com/space/titan’s-sunsets-give-insight-hazy-atmospheres-exoplanets/ (accessed October 30, 2018).

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, Commercial Maritime Industry: Updated Information on Federal Assessments, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1999.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

M.E. Bornheimer, The influence of leadership development programs on the community college leadership shortage: A case study, Doctoral dissertation, Northcentral University, 2010.

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]

M. Schulman, Living His Truth, New York Times (2017) ST1.

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	Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
Abbreviation	Physica A
ISSN (print)	0378-4371
Scope	Statistics and Probability Condensed Matter Physics