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

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

M. E. Bailey, Planetary science. Where have all the comets gone?, Science 296, 2151 (2002).

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

C. M. Chandrashekar and T. Busch, Quantum percolation and transition point of a directed discrete-time quantum walk, Sci. Rep. 4, 6583 (2014).

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

V. Narayan, S. Ramaswamy, and N. Menon, Long-lived giant number fluctuations in a swarming granular nematic, Science 317, 105 (2007).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

P. J. Focia, I. V. Shepotinovskaya, J. A. Seidler, and D. M. Freymann, Heterodimeric GTPase core of the SRP targeting complex, Science 303, 373 (2004).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

L. Doldi, Validation of Communications Systems with SDL (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2005).

An edited book

[1]

J.-S. Pan, S.-M. Chen, and N. T. Nguyen, editors , Computational Collective Intelligence. Technologies and Applications: Second International Conference, ICCCI 2010, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, November 10-12, 2010, Proceedings, Part II, Vol. 6422 (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010).

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

G.-J. Hospers and N. Reverda, The Geography of Population Decline, in Managing Population Decline in Europe’s Urban and Rural Areas, edited by N. Reverda (Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015), pp. 29–37.

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 Materials.

Blog post

[1]

J. Davis, We Should Be Eating 10 Portions Of Fruit And Veg A Day To Live Longer, (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, Year 2000 Computing Crisis: Actions Needed to Address Credit Union Systems’ Year 2000 Problem, No. AIMD-98-48, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

M. M.-X. Pham, Flymed Pharmacy, LLC, Home Delivery Services a Business Plan, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 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]

B. Brantley, Returning to Broadway on Heavier Wings, New York Times C1 (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 Materials
ISSN (online)	2475-9953
Scope