How to format your references using the Physics of Life Reviews citation style

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

Kamel F. Epidemiology. Paths from pesticides to Parkinson’s. Science 2013;341:722–3.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Paterson WS, Reeh N. Thinning of the ice sheet in northwest Greenland over the past forty years. Nature 2001;414:60–2.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Naumov II, Bellaiche L, Fu H. Unusual phase transitions in ferroelectric nanodisks and nanorods. Nature 2004;432:737–40.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

[1]

Gasper WC, Marinov GK, Pauli-Behn F, Scott MT, Newberry K, DeSalvo G, et al. Fully automated high-throughput chromatin immunoprecipitation for ChIP-seq: identifying ChIP-quality p300 monoclonal antibodies. Sci Rep 2014;4:5152.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Stokes G. A Practical Guide to the Wiring Regulations. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Science Ltd; 2008.

An edited book

[1]

Heng S-H, Kurosawa K, editors. Provable Security: 4th International Conference, ProvSec 2010, Malacca, Malaysia, October 13-15, 2010. Proceedings. vol. 6402. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2010.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Hossain MF, Alsharif MR, Yamashita K. LMMSE-Based Image Denoising in Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform Domain. In: Elmoataz A, Lezoray O, Nouboud F, Mammass D, Meunier J, editors. Image and Signal Processing: 4th International Conference, ICISP 2010, Trois-Rivières, QC, Canada, June 30-July 2, 2010. Proceedings, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2010, p. 36–43.

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 of Life Reviews.

Blog post

[1]

Luntz S. Methane Hunting Tool Could Boost The Search For Extraterrestrials. 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. ADP Acquisitions: SSA Should Limit ADP Procurements Until Further Testing Is Performed. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1986.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Clater MJ. Interposed between God and man: Agency in the Requiems of Berlioz and Fauré. Doctoral dissertation. Indiana University, 2009.

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]

Billard M. Silver Jubilee. New York Times 2010:E6.

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 of Life Reviews
Abbreviation	Phys. Life Rev.
ISSN (print)	1571-0645
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences Artificial Intelligence General Physics and Astronomy