How to format your references using the Physics Letters B citation style

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

[1]

M.R. Diehl, Biochemistry. Templating a molecular tug-of-war, Science 338 (2012) 626–627.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

R.L. Cifelli, B.M. Davis, Paleontology. Marsupial origins, Science 302 (2003) 1899–1900.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

M. Rodell, I. Velicogna, J.S. Famiglietti, Satellite-based estimates of groundwater depletion in India, Nature 460 (2009) 999–1002.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

E.A.A. Pogna, C. Rodríguez-Tinoco, M. Krisch, J. Rodríguez-Viejo, T. Scopigno, Acoustic-like dynamics of amorphous drugs in the THz regime, Sci. Rep. 3 (2013) 2518.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

M.J. Zwecher, Retirement Portfolios Workbook, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2010.

An edited book

[1]

M. Detyniecki, A. García-Serrano, A. Nürnberger, S. Stober, eds., Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval. Large-Scale Multimedia Retrieval and Evaluation: 9th International Workshop, AMR 2011, Barcelona, Spain, July 18-19, 2011, Revised Selected Papers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

B. Niu, X. Li, X. Zhu, X. Li, H. Li, Are You Really My Friend? Exactly Spatiotemporal Matching Scheme in Privacy-Aware Mobile Social Networks, in: J. Tian, J. Jing, M. Srivatsa (Eds.), International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks: 10th International ICST Conference, SecureComm 2014, Beijing, China, September 24-26, 2014, Revised Selected Papers, Part II, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015: pp. 33–40.

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 Letters B.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Voyager 2 Images Reveal New Insight To Inner Structure of Uranus, IFLScience (2014). https://www.iflscience.com/space/old-voyager-2-images-reveal-new-insight-inner-structure-uranus/ (accessed October 30, 2018).

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, The Johnstown Area Flood of 1977: A Case Study for the Future, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1978.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Y. Zhang, A Grant Proposal for Mindfulness-Based Self-Care Training for Child Welfare Workers, 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]

M. Pilon, A Different Way of Taking Off at J.F.K, New York Times (2013) D8.

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 Letters B
Abbreviation	Phys. Lett. B
ISSN (print)	0370-2693
Scope	Nuclear and High Energy Physics