How to format your references using the Physica Scripta citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Physica Scripta. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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]

Pace N R 2006 Time for a change Nature 441 289

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Hardy J and Selkoe D J 2002 The amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease: progress and problems on the road to therapeutics Science 297 353–6

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Buehler M J, Abraham F F and Gao H 2003 Hyperelasticity governs dynamic fracture at a critical length scale Nature 426 141–6

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Lee S-H, Reeves J M, Wilson J C, Hunton D E, Viggiano A A, Miller T M, Ballenthin J O and Lait L R 2003 Particle formation by ion nucleation in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere Science 301 1886–9

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Thatcher A 2011 God, Sex, and Gender (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell)

An edited book

[1]

Fränti P, Brown G, Loog M, Escolano F and Pelillo M 2014 Structural, Syntactic, and Statistical Pattern Recognition: Joint IAPR International Workshop, S+SSPR 2014, Joensuu, Finland, August 20-22, 2014. Proceedings vol 8621 (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Shtober-Zisu N and Inbar M 2014 Geomorphology Lake Kinneret: Ecology and Management ed T Zohary, A Sukenik, T Berman and A Nishri (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands) pp 69–77

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 Physica Scripta.

Blog post

[1]

Taub B 2016 Oxytocin May Make You Better At Keeping A Beat IFLScience

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 2001 Motor Vehicle Safety: NHTSA’s Ability to Detect and Recall Defective Replacement Crash Parts Is Limited (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Lee S 2005 The Influence of Product Involvement and Fan Identification on Response to Team Sponsors’ Products Doctoral dissertation (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University)

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]

Yee V 2014 Closing on Short Notice, Brooklyn Assisted-Living Home Angers Families New York Times A20

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 Scripta
Abbreviation	Phys. Scr.
ISSN (print)	0031-8949
ISSN (online)	1402-4896
Scope	Mathematical Physics Condensed Matter Physics Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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