How to format your references using the Physical Review Physics Education Research citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Physical Review Physics Education Research. 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. Scudellari, Drug development: try and try again, Nature 516, S4 (2014).

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

R. J. Youle and A. M. van der Bliek, Mitochondrial fission, fusion, and stress, Science 337, 1062 (2012).

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

M. Skipper, U. Weiss, and N. Gray, Plasticity, Nature 465, 703 (2010).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

S. M. Tom, C. R. Fox, C. Trepel, and R. A. Poldrack, The neural basis of loss aversion in decision-making under risk, Science 315, 515 (2007).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

A. Hezaveh, SAS® 9 Study Guide (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2007).

An edited book

[1]

J.-M. Escoffre and A. Bouakaz, editors , Therapeutic Ultrasound, 1st ed. 2016, Vol. 880 (Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016).

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

J. W. Cangussu, K. C. Cooper, and E. W. Wong, Multi Criteria Selection of Components Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process, in Component-Based Software Engineering: 9th International Symposium, CBSE 2006, Västerås, Sweden, June 29 - July 1, 2006. Proceedings, edited by I. Gorton, G. T. Heineman, I. Crnković, H. W. Schmidt, J. A. Stafford, C. Szyperski, and K. Wallnau (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006), pp. 67–81.

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 Physics Education Research.

Blog post

[1]

J. O`Callaghan, Shape Of Martian Pebbles Reveals A Knee-Deep River Once Flowed On The Surface, (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, School Bus Safety: Crash Data Trends and Federal and State Requirements, No. GAO-17-209, U.S. Government Printing Office, 2017.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

A. Mylonas, “Women Are the Pillars of the Family”: Athenian Women’s Survival Strategies during Economic Crisis, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2014.

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]

G. Vecsey, Of Horns and Whines And the Humble Earplug, New York Times B11 (2010).

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 Physics Education Research
ISSN (online)	2469-9896
Scope