How to format your references using the Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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]
El-Azab A 2008 Materials science. The statistical mechanics of strain-hardened metals Science 320 1729–30
A journal article with 2 authors
[1]
Matthews P G D and Seymour R S 2006 Diving insects boost their buoyancy bubbles Nature 441 171
A journal article with 3 authors
[1]
Yan W, Smith C and Cheng L 2013 Expanded activity of dimer nucleases by combining ZFN and TALEN for genome editing Sci. Rep. 3 2376
A journal article with 99 or more authors
[1]
Xu Z, Liu Y, Ma Z, Sam Toloo G, Hu W and Tong S 2014 Assessment of the temperature effect on childhood diarrhea using satellite imagery Sci. Rep. 4 5389

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
[1]
Durenard E A 2013 Professional Automated Trading (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
An edited book
[1]
Vayenas C G 2011 Interfacial Phenomena in Electrocatalysis vol 51 (New York, NY: Springer)
A chapter in an edited book
[1]
Mächel H, Rudolf B, Maurer T, Hagemann S, Hagenbrock R, Kitaev L, Førland E J, Rasuvaev V and Tveito O E 2012 Observed Hydrological Cycle Arctic Climate Change: The ACSYS Decade and Beyond Atmospheric and Oceanographic Sciences Library ed P Lemke and H-W Jacobi (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands) pp 199–246

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 Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion.

Blog post
[1]
Felton J 2017 Flat-Earther’s “Experiment” Goes Viral, Just Not In The Way He’d Hoped IFLScience

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 1976 Disapproval of Seattle, Washington, School District Applications for Emergency School Aid Funds (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
[1]
Thomas L E 2017 Youth Art Ambassadors: A Youth Participatory Action Research Project Using Social Justice to Incite Change in Classrooms where Teachers Teach Young People of Color Doctoral dissertation (Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach)

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]
Poniewozik J 2016 Rebooting the Dawn of Silicon Valley New York Times C1

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 titlePlasma Physics and Controlled Fusion
AbbreviationPlasma Phys. Control. Fusion
ISSN (print)0741-3335
ISSN (online)1361-6587
ScopeNuclear Energy and Engineering
Condensed Matter Physics

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