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]

A. Nel, Atmosphere. Air pollution-related illness: effects of particles, Science 308 (2005) 804–806.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

M.T. Lin, M.F. Beal, Mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress in neurodegenerative diseases, Nature 443 (2006) 787–795.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

T.R. Mempel, S.E. Henrickson, U.H. Von Andrian, T-cell priming by dendritic cells in lymph nodes occurs in three distinct phases, Nature 427 (2004) 154–159.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

J.E. Rault, T.O. Menteş, A. Locatelli, N. Barrett, Reversible switching of in-plane polarized ferroelectric domains in BaTiO3(001) with very low energy electrons, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 6792.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

P.M. Griffin, H.B. Nembhard, C.J. DeFlitch, N.D. Bastian, H. Kang, D.A. Muñoz, Healthcare Systems Engineering, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ, 2015.

An edited book

[1]

M. Noguchi, ed., ZEMCH: Toward the Delivery of Zero Energy Mass Custom Homes, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A. Reichstaller, B. Eberhardinger, A. Knapp, W. Reif, M. Gehlen, Risk-Based Interoperability Testing Using Reinforcement Learning, in: F. Wotawa, M. Nica, N. Kushik (Eds.), Testing Software and Systems: 28th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, ICTSS 2016, Graz, Austria, October 17-19, 2016, Proceedings, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016: pp. 52–69.

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, Why Are Humans Altruistic?, IFLScience (2014).

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, Maritime Industry: As U.S. Single-Hull Oil Vessels Are Eliminated, Few Double-Hull Vessels May Replace Them, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2000.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

T.N. Tucker, Virtual K-12 leadership: A postmodern paradigm, Doctoral dissertation, Florida Atlantic University, 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]

M.J.O. Murphy, ‘Friday File’: The Whitney’s 1966 Debut (Now the Met Breuer), New York Times (2016) C26.

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