How to format your references using the Physical Review E citation style

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

W. B. Fairley, Outrageous events: don’t count them out, Science 290, 715 (2000).

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

A. Mohd-Sarip and C. P. Verrijzer, Molecular biology. A higher order of silence, Science 306, 1484 (2004).

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

R. M. Timm, R. R. Ramey 2nd, and Nomenclature Committee of the American Society of Mammalogists, What constitutes a proper description?, Science 309, 2163 (2005).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

R. J. Cannara, M. J. Brukman, K. Cimatu, A. V. Sumant, S. Baldelli, and R. W. Carpick, Nanoscale friction varied by isotopic shifting of surface vibrational frequencies, Science 318, 780 (2007).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

F. Y. Schulman, Veterinarian’s Guide to Maximizing Biopsy Results (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Chichester, UK, 2016).

An edited book

[1]

S. K. S. Cheung, J. Fong, L.-F. Kwok, K. Li, and R. Kwan, editors , Hybrid Learning: 5th International Conference, ICHL 2012, Guangzhou, China, August 13-15, 2012. Proceedings, Vol. 7411 (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012).

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A. C. J. Luo and D. O’Connor, A Gear Transmission System, in System Dynamics with Interaction Discontinuity, edited by D. M. O’Connor (Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015), pp. 139–182.

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 Review E.

Blog post

[1]

J. Davis, Why Are Some People Selfish?, (unpublished).

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, Motor Vehicle Safety: A Review of the NTSB Report on Rear Seat Lap Belt Effectiveness, No. RCED-88-13, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

D. W. Purdy, Identifying Shallow Foundation Failure Modes and Mechanisms Using Surveillance of a Transparent Granular Soil Surrogate, Doctoral dissertation, Florida Atlantic University, 2017.

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. Paulson, ‘Hamilton’ Tries New Tactic to Battle Bots and Scalpers, New York Times C5 (2017).

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 Review E
Abbreviation	Phys. Rev. E Stat. Nonlin. Soft Matter Phys.
ISSN (print)	1539-3755
ISSN (online)	1550-2376
Scope	Statistics and Probability Condensed Matter Physics Statistical and Nonlinear Physics