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]

Deroy O 2015 Eat insects for fun, not to help the environment Nature 521 395

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Bloch J I and Boyer D M 2002 Grasping primate origins Science 298 1606–10

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Bhandary S, Eriksson O and Sanyal B 2013 Defect controlled magnetism in FeP/graphene/Ni(111) Sci. Rep. 3 3405

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Neyt C, Jagla K, Thisse C, Thisse B, Haines L and Currie P D 2000 Evolutionary origins of vertebrate appendicular muscle Nature 408 82–6

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Piegorsch W W and Bailer A J 2005 Analyzing Environmental Data (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

[1]

Candaele B, Soudris D and Anagnostopoulos I 2015 Trusted Computing for Embedded Systems (Cham: Springer International Publishing)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Furneaux B 2012 Task-Technology Fit Theory: A Survey and Synopsis of the Literature Information Systems Theory: Explaining and Predicting Our Digital Society, Vol. 1 Integrated Series in Information Systems ed Y K Dwivedi, M R Wade and S L Schneberger (New York, NY: Springer) pp 87–106

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]

Andrew E 2014 Direct Brain-To-Brain Communication Used in Humans 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 1972 Follow up Review of Automatic Data Processing Activities Jet Propulsion Laboratory (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]

Fisher J D 2015 A profile of the chief student affairs officers of the California State University system Doctoral dissertation (Malibu, CA: Pepperdine 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]

Chira S 2016 Ugly Campaign Descended Into a Battle of Two Caricatures New York Times P8

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