How to format your references using the Proceedings of the Royal Society A citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Proceedings of the Royal Society A. 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

Abbott A. 2001 Last-minute floods sink research. Nature 413, 443.

A journal article with 2 authors

Sykora S, Becker KW. 2013 Heavy fermion properties of the Kondo Lattice model. Sci. Rep. 3, 2691.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kingon AI, Maria JP, Streiffer SK. 2000 Alternative dielectrics to silicon dioxide for memory and logic devices. Nature 406, 1032–1038.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Köhler R, Tredicucci A, Beltram F, Beere HE, Linfield EH, Davies AG, Ritchie DA, Iotti RC, Rossi F. 2002 Terahertz semiconductor-heterostructure laser. Nature 417, 156–159.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chapman BR, Bolen EG. 2015 Ecology of North America. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Schulzrinne H, State R, Niccolini S, editors. 2008 Principles, Systems and Applications of IP Telecommunications. Services and Security for Next Generation Networks: Second International Conference, IPTComm 2008, Heidelberg, Germany, July 1-2, 2008. Revised Selected Papers. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Liu J, Wang X. 2011 Discrete Sliding Mode Control. In Advanced Sliding Mode Control for Mechanical Systems: Design, Analysis and MATLAB Simulation (ed X Wang), pp. 97–110. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

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 Royal Society A.

Blog post

Andrew E. 2015 Strange Microorganism Under The Sea May Be Missing Link In Evolution. IFLScience. See https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/strange-microorganism-under-sea-may-be-missing-link-evolution/ (accessed on 30 October 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. 1982 Improvements Can Be Made in the Fiscal Management of CETA.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Engel SM. 2016 Proform-antecedent linking in listeners with language impairments and unimpaired listeners. Doctoral dissertation, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA.

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

Kishkovsky S. 2008 Conflict Tests Ties Between the Georgian and Russian Orthodox Churches. New York Times, 6 September. , A5.

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 Royal Society A
Abbreviation	Proc. Math. Phys. Eng. Sci.
ISSN (print)	1364-5021
ISSN (online)	1471-2946
Scope	General Engineering General Mathematics General Physics and Astronomy

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