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]

Collins F S 2008 Retrospective: Victor A. McKusick (1921-2008) Science 321 925

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Sanderson W C and Scherbov S 2010 Demography. Remeasuring aging Science 329 1287–8

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Watanabe Y, Farquhar J and Ohmoto H 2009 Anomalous fractionations of sulfur isotopes during thermochemical sulfate reduction Science 324 370–3

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Hammond S M, Bernstein E, Beach D and Hannon G J 2000 An RNA-directed nuclease mediates post-transcriptional gene silencing in Drosophila cells Nature 404 293–6

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Sarker S D and Nahar L 2007 Chemistry for Pharmacy Students (West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd,.)

An edited book

[1]

Anishchenko V S 2007 Nonlinear Dynamics of Chaotic and Stochastic Systems: Tutorial and Modern Developments ed V Astakhov, T Vadivasova, A Neiman and L Schimansky-Geier (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Andrä J, Gutsmann T, Müller M and Schromm A B 2010 Interactions between Lipid A and Serum Proteins Lipid A in Cancer Therapy Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology ed J-F Jeannin (New York, NY: Springer) pp 39–51

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]

Carpineti A 2016 Blue Galaxy Could Hold Clues To The Origin Of The Universe 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 Joint Strike Fighter Acquisition: Mature Critical Technologies Needed to Reduce Risks (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]

Monteiro K R 2012 An experimental study of corrective feedback on synchronous oral computer-mediated communication Doctoral dissertation (Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach)

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]

Brantley B 2016 So Smart (but Truly Vile) New York Times C1

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