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]

Yayanos A A 2002 Are cells viable at gigapascal pressures? Science 297 295

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Labinger J A and Bercaw J E 2002 Understanding and exploiting C-H bond activation Nature 417 507–14

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Coulson T, Lindström J and Cotgreave P 2002 Ecology. Seeking new recruits Science 295 2023–4

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Gurnett D A, Persoon A M, Kurth W S, Groene J B, Averkamp T F, Dougherty M K and Southwood D J 2007 The variable rotation period of the inner region of Saturn’s plasma disk Science 316 442–5

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

van der Heide P 2014 Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

[1]

Butz A, Fisher B, Christie M, Krüger A, Olivier P and Therón R 2009 Smart Graphics: 10th International Symposium, SG 2009, Salamanca, Spain, May 28-30, 2009. Proceedings vol 5531 (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Power C 2006 BASIC EDUCATION FOR ALL Towards a Global Community: Educating for Tomorrow’s World EDUCATION IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC REGION: ISSUES, CONCERNS AND PROSPECTS ed J Campbell, N Baikaloff and C Power (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands) pp 71–80

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]

Andrew E 2015 Genetically Modified Immune Cells Control HIV Long-Term 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 1977 Examination of the Pricing of a Negotiated Fixed-Price Incentive Contract Awarded on a Noncompetitive Basis (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]

Dalton R 2010 The story of Huo Yuanjia and the narrative of national humiliation in post-Mao China 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]

St. John Mandel E 2016 Brave New World New York Times BR9

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