How to format your references using the Physics in Medicine and Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Physics in Medicine and Biology. 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	Download the output style file
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

Fergany N 2006 Islam and Science: steps towards reform Nature 444 33–4

A journal article with 2 authors

Domkin V and Chabes A 2014 Phosphines are ribonucleotide reductase reductants that act via C-terminal cysteines similar to thioredoxins and glutaredoxins Sci. Rep. 4 5539

A journal article with 3 authors

Bai S, Xu Q and Qin Y 2013 Vibration driven vehicle inspired from grass spike Sci. Rep. 3 1851

A journal article with 99 or more authors

Panowski S H, Wolff S, Aguilaniu H, Durieux J and Dillin A 2007 PHA-4/Foxa mediates diet-restriction-induced longevity of C. elegans Nature 447 550–5

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Seyfried T N 2012 Cancer as a Metabolic Disease (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

Dabbagh N 2016 Learning Technologies and Globalization: Pedagogical Frameworks and Applications ed A D Benson, A Denham, R Joseph, M Al-Freih, G Zgheib, H Fake and Z Guo (Cham: Springer International Publishing)

A chapter in an edited book

Takama Y and Muto Y 2009 Mining User Preference Model from Utterances Foundations of Computational, IntelligenceVolume 6: Data Mining Studies in Computational Intelligence ed A Abraham, A-E Hassanien, A P de Leon F. de Carvalho and V Snášel (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer) pp 97–123

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 in Medicine and Biology.

Blog post

Andrew E 2014 Direct Brain-To-Brain Communication Used in Humans IFLScience Online: https://www.iflscience.com/brain/direct-brain-brain-communication-used-humans/

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

Government Accountability Office 2007 Critical Infrastructure Protection: Sector-Specific Plans’ Coverage of Key Cyber Security Elements Varies (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

Romer C 2017 WhatsUpDoc: A Patient Portal Technology Doctoral dissertation (Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach)

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

Barron J and Wang V 2017 They Don’t Ride the Subway, Though Its Future Rides on Them New York Times A1

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Fergany 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Fergany 2006, Domkin and Chabes 2014).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Domkin and Chabes 2014)
Three or more authors: (Panowski et al 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	Physics in Medicine and Biology
Abbreviation	Phys. Med. Biol.
ISSN (print)	0031-9155
ISSN (online)	1361-6560
Scope	Radiology Nuclear Medicine and imaging Radiological and Ultrasound Technology