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]

F. Perez, Cell biology: Organelles under light control, Nature. 518 (2015) 41–42.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

S.N. Pisharody, R.R. Jones, Probing two-electron dynamics of an atom, Science. 303 (2004) 813–815.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

A. Ashton, A.B. Murray, O. Arnault, Formation of coastline features by large-scale instabilities induced by high-angle waves, Nature. 414 (2001) 296–300.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

L. Lens, S. Van Dongen, K. Norris, M. Githiru, E. Matthysen, Avian persistence in fragmented rainforest, Science. 298 (2002) 1236–1238.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

P. McGuiggan, GPRS in Practice, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2005.

An edited book

[1]

J. Vitek, ed., Objects, Models, Components, Patterns: 48th International Conference, TOOLS 2010, Málaga, Spain, June 28–July 2, 2010. Proceedings, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

L. Dong, K. Chen, Informal Analysis Schemes of Cryptographic Protocols, in: K. Chen (Ed.), Cryptographic Protocol: Security Analysis Based on Trusted Freshness, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012: pp. 83–152.

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]

J. Davis, Eating Human Brains Drove Evolution In Remote Tribe, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Electronic Government: Success of the Office of Management and Budget’s 25 Initiatives Depends on Effective Management and Oversight, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2003.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

R.I. Garcia, Variable selection for models with missing data, Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2009.

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]

J. Schembari, Factory Masterpieces, New York Times. (2017) TR1.

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

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