How to format your references using the Physiological Reviews citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Physiological 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

Bromirski PD. Geophysics. Earth vibrations. Science 324: 1026–1027, 2009.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gelman R, Gallistel CR. Language and the origin of numerical concepts. Science 306: 441–443, 2004.

A journal article with 3 authors

Horsewill AJ, Jones NH, Caciuffo R. Evidence for coherent proton tunneling in a hydrogen bond network. Science 291: 100–103, 2001.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Rosi NL, Giljohann DA, Thaxton CS, Lytton-Jean AKR, Han MS, Mirkin CA. Oligonucleotide-modified gold nanoparticles for intracellular gene regulation. Science 312: 1027–1030, 2006.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Venkateshan SP. Mechanical Measurements. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2015.

An edited book

Blowey J, Jensen M, editors. Frontiers in Numerical Analysis - Durham 2010. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2012.

A chapter in an edited book

Lascarides A, Asher N. Segmented Discourse Representation Theory: Dynamic Semantics With Discourse Structure. In: Computing Meaning, edited by Bunt H, Muskens R. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2007, p. 87–124.

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 Physiological Reviews.

Blog post

Carpineti C. Watch How These Elephants Respond To A Swarm Of Bees [Online]. IFLScience IFLScience: 2017. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/watch-how-these-elephants-respond-to-a-swarm-of-bees/ [30 Oct. 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

Government Accountability Office. Automatic Data Processing Problems at the Social Security Administration. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Mills CC. Olfaction and Exhibition: Assessing the Impact of Scent in Museums on Exhibit Engagement, Learning and Empathy. Florida Atlantic University: 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

Flegenheimer M. On Trump’s Right Flank, a Survivor Well Attuned to Resentment. New York Times: A1, 2017.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (2).
This sentence cites two references (2, 4).
This sentence cites four references (2, 4, 6, 8).

About the journal

Full journal title	Physiological Reviews
Abbreviation	Physiol. Rev.
ISSN (print)	0031-9333
ISSN (online)	1522-1210
Scope	Molecular Biology Physiology General Medicine Physiology (medical)