How to format your references using the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India Section A: Physical Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India Section A: Physical Sciences. 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

Padian K (2008) Darwin’s enduring legacy. Nature 451:632–634

A journal article with 2 authors

Park J, Yook S-H (2014) Bayesian inference of natural rankings in incomplete competition networks. Sci Rep 4:6212

A journal article with 3 authors

Chen F, Lam C-H, Tsui OKC (2014) Materials science. The surface mobility of glasses. Science 343:975–976

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Häring M, Vestergaard G, Rachel R, et al (2005) Virology: independent virus development outside a host. Nature 436:1101–1102

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Joseph CL, Bernal S (2016) Modern Devices. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Poluektova LY, Garcia JV, Koyanagi Y, et al (2014) Humanized Mice for HIV Research. Springer, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Brown JR (2005) Naturalism, Pictures, and Platonic Intuitions. In: Mancosu P, Jørgensen KF, Pedersen SA (eds) Visualization, Explanation and Reasoning Styles in Mathematics. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 57–73

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 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India Section A: Physical Sciences.

Blog post

Andrew D (2015) Whale Unexpectedly Slaps Girl Around The Face. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/whale-slaps-girl-around-face/. Accessed 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 (1992) Tax Systems Modernization: Progress Mixed In Addressing Critical Success Factors. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Masumdar S (2017) Vibration-based electromagnetic energy harvester for low-frequency road traffic. Doctoral dissertation, 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

George N (2013) Still Too Good, Too Bad or Invisible. New York Times AR1

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	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India Section A: Physical Sciences
Abbreviation	Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. India Sect. A
ISSN (print)	0369-8203
ISSN (online)	2250-1762
Scope	General Physics and Astronomy