How to format your references using the Reports on Progress in Physics citation style

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

[1]

Childress L 2014 Physics. Diamond dynamics under control Science 345 1247–8

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Sive H and Sarma S 2013 Education: online on-ramps Nature 499 277–8

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Van Roy P, Daley A C and Briggs D E G 2015 Anomalocaridid trunk limb homology revealed by a giant filter-feeder with paired flaps Nature 522 77–80

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Raber J, Wong D, Yu G Q, Buttini M, Mahley R W, Pitas R E and Mucke L 2000 Apolipoprotein E and cognitive performance Nature 404 352–4

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Huddleston R 2010 Android® Fully Loaded (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc.)

An edited book

[1]

Baharvand H and Aghdami N 2013 Regenerative Medicine and Cell Therapy (Totowa, NJ: Humana Press)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Ben T and Qiu S 2014 Carbon Dioxide Capture in Porous Aromatic Frameworks Porous Materials for Carbon Dioxide Capture Green Chemistry and Sustainable Technology ed A-H Lu and S Dai (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer) pp 115–42

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 Reports on Progress in Physics.

Blog post

[1]

Fang J 2014 NASA Sees Your Holiday Lights From Space 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 1994 USDA Restructuring: Refocus Info Share Program on Business Processes Rather Than Technology (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]

Eastwood J L 2010 The effects of an interdisciplinary undergraduate human biology program on socioscientific reasoning, content learning, and understanding of inquiry Doctoral dissertation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University)

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]

Marx L 2015 Designing a Lasting Partnership New York Times ST13

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	Reports on Progress in Physics
Abbreviation	Rep. Prog. Phys.
ISSN (print)	0034-4885
ISSN (online)	1361-6633
Scope	General Physics and Astronomy