How to format your references using the Physics of Plasmas citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Physics of Plasmas. 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 L. Skinner, “Climate change. A long view on climate sensitivity,” Science 337(6097), 917–919 (2012).

A journal article with 2 authors

¹ S.J. Pennycook, and S.V. Kalinin, “Microscopy: Hasten high resolution,” Nature 515(7528), 487–488 (2014).

A journal article with 3 authors

¹ Z. Mukandavire, D.L. Smith, and J.G. Morris Jr, “Cholera in Haiti: reproductive numbers and vaccination coverage estimates,” Sci. Rep. 3, 997 (2013).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

¹ R.S. Friedman, M.C. McAlpine, D.S. Ricketts, D. Ham, and C.M. Lieber, “Nanotechnology: high-speed integrated nanowire circuits,” Nature 434(7037), 1085 (2005).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

¹ B.S. El-Haik, Axiomatic Quality (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2005).

An edited book

¹ C.A.C. Coello, V. Cutello, K. Deb, S. Forrest, G. Nicosia, and M. Pavone, editors , Parallel Problem Solving from Nature - PPSN XII: 12th International Conference, Taormina, Italy, September 1-5, 2012, Proceedings, Part II (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012).

A chapter in an edited book

¹ S. Angelopoulos, G. Lucarelli, and K.T. Nguyen, “Primal-Dual and Dual-Fitting Analysis of Online Scheduling Algorithms for Generalized Flow Time Problems,” in Algorithms - ESA 2015: 23rd Annual European Symposium, Patras, Greece, September 14-16, 2015, Proceedings, edited by N. Bansal and I. Finocchi, (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2015), pp. 35–46.

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 Plasmas.

Blog post

¹ S. Luntz, “Corals Beat Heat By Swapping Algal Partners,” IFLScience, (2015).

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, Information Technology: DOD and VA Have Increased Their Sharing of Health Information, but Further Actions Are Needed (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2008).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

¹ J. Shearer, Application of the Recovery Model in Clinical Practice, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2012.

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 G. Loomis, “Phantasmagoric Glimpses of Beauty Amid All of the Messiness,” New York Times, 0 (2012).

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

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 Plasmas
Abbreviation	Phys. Plasmas
ISSN (print)	1070-664X
ISSN (online)	1089-7674
Scope	Condensed Matter Physics