How to format your references using the Physics Education citation style

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

Shea K 2007 Ecology. How the wood moves Science 315 1231–2

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Steig E J and Wolfe A P 2008 Atmospheric science. Sprucing up Greenland Science 320 1595–6

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Verburg P, Hecky R E and Kling H 2003 Ecological consequences of a century of warming in Lake Tanganyika Science 301 505–7

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Gibson D G, Glass J I, Lartigue C, Noskov V N, Chuang R-Y, Algire M A, Benders G A, Montague M G, Ma L, Moodie M M, Merryman C, Vashee S, Krishnakumar R, Assad-Garcia N, Andrews-Pfannkoch C, Denisova E A, Young L, Qi Z-Q, Segall-Shapiro T H, Calvey C H, Parmar P P, Hutchison C A 3rd, Smith H O and Venter J C 2010 Creation of a bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesized genome Science 329 52–6

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Bock R 2005 Handbuch der analytisch-chemischen Aufschlussmethoden (Weinheim, FRG: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA)

An edited book

[1]

Tai X-C, Bae E, Chan T F and Lysaker M 2015 Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition: 10th International Conference, EMMCVPR 2015, Hong Kong, China, January 13-16, 2015. Proceedings vol 8932 (Cham: Springer International Publishing)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Atluri V and Shin H 2007 Efficient Security Policy Enforcement in a Location Based Service Environment Data and Applications Security XXI: 21st Annual IFIP WG 11.3 Working Conference on Data and Applications Security, Redondo Beach, CA, USA, July 8-11, 2007. Proceedings Lecture Notes in Computer Science ed S Barker and G-J Ahn (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer) pp 61–76

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 Physics Education.

Blog post

[1]

Fang J 2014 Rare Beaked Whale Washes Up in Australia 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 1993 Federal Research: Aging Federal Laboratories Need Repairs and Upgrades (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]

Ponder S 2010 Parent information nights: An elementary school principal’s search to increase parent input and affect the learning-at-home environment Doctoral dissertation ( St. Charles, MO: Lindenwood University)

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]

Barron J 2016 Rebirth of a Bronx Housing Complex Aims to Cut Crime and Increase Homes New York Times A24

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	Physics Education
Abbreviation	Phys. Educ.
ISSN (print)	0031-9120
ISSN (online)	1361-6552
Scope	General Physics and Astronomy Education