How to format your references using the Physical Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Physical Biology. 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]

Judson H F 2001 Talking about the genome Nature 409 769

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Hellweg S and Milà i Canals L 2014 Emerging approaches, challenges and opportunities in life cycle assessment Science 344 1109–13

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Krumholz M R, McKee C F and Klein R I 2005 The formation of stars by gravitational collapse rather than competitive accretion Nature 438 332–4

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Xie J, Lu J, Lin J, Zhou X, Xu Q, Li M and Zhang J 2014 Insights into transport velocity of colloid-associated plutonium relative to tritium in porous media Sci. Rep. 4 5037

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Eggleston B 2008 The ICE Conditions of Contract: Seventh Edition (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Science Ltd)

An edited book

[1]

Nishida T 2014 Conversational Informatics: A Data-Intensive Approach with Emphasis on Nonverbal Communication ed A Nakazawa, Y Ohmoto and Y Mohammad (Tokyo: Springer Japan)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Biermann E, Ermel C and Taentzer G 2008 Precise Semantics of EMF Model Transformations by Graph Transformation Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems: 11th International Conference, MoDELS 2008, Toulouse, France, September 28 - October 3, 2008. Proceedings Lecture Notes in Computer Science ed K Czarnecki, I Ober, J-M Bruel, A Uhl and M Völter (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer) pp 53–67

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 Physical Biology.

Blog post

[1]

Hale T 2016 North Korea Accidently Leaks How Tiny Its Internet Is 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 1990 Continuing Professional Education: Federal GS-510 Accountants’ Report (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]

Farrell B M 2010 Body composition changes and work-efficiency effects from diet modification and incorporation of an at-home exercise regimen Doctoral dissertation (Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati)

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]

Crow K 2002 Finally, a New York Icon Will Exist Only in Memory New York Times 146

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	Physical Biology
Abbreviation	Phys. Biol.
ISSN (print)	1478-3967
ISSN (online)	1478-3975
Scope	Biophysics Cell Biology Molecular Biology Structural Biology