How to format your references using the Physics Reports citation style

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

R.H. Ffrench-Constant, Genomics: Of monarchs and migration, Nature 514 (2014) 314–315.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

C.M. Clark, D. Tilman, Loss of plant species after chronic low-level nitrogen deposition to prairie grasslands, Nature 451 (2008) 712–715.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

S. Karan, Z. Jiang, A.G. Livingston, MEMBRANE FILTRATION. Sub-10 nm polyamide nanofilms with ultrafast solvent transport for molecular separation, Science 348 (2015) 1347–1351.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

D.R. Toomey, D. Jousselin, R.A. Dunn, W.S.D. Wilcock, R.S. Detrick, Skew of mantle upwelling beneath the East Pacific Rise governs segmentation, Nature 446 (2007) 409–414.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

J.-F. Serval, J.-P. Tranié, The Monetary System, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2014.

An edited book

[1]

B. Jonsson, Ecology of Atlantic Salmon and Brown Trout: Habitat as a template for life histories, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

I.F. Creed, G.Z. Sass, Digital Terrain Analysis Approaches for Tracking Hydrological and Biogeochemical Pathways and Processes in Forested Landscapes, in: D.F. Levia, D. Carlyle-Moses, T. Tanaka (Eds.), Forest Hydrology and Biogeochemistry: Synthesis of Past Research and Future Directions, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2011: pp. 69–100.

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 Reports.

Blog post

[1]

T. Hale, HAARP Opens Doors To Conspiracy Theorists To Prove “It Is Not Capable Of Mind Control,” IFLScience (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/environment/haarp-opens-doors-to-conspiracy-theorists-to-prove-it-is-not-capable-of-mind-control/ (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, Computer Matching Act: OMB and Selected Agencies Need to Ensure Consistent Implementation, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2014.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

R. Leung, The Effect of Mission Assurance on ELV Launch Success Rate: An Analysis of Two Management Systems for Launch Vehicles, Doctoral dissertation, George Washington 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]

B. Kenigsberg, Toys, Manolos and Tennis Champs, New York Times (2017) AR72.

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 Reports
Abbreviation	Phys. Rep.
ISSN (print)	0370-1573
Scope	General Physics and Astronomy