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]

Girardi L 2014 Astronomy. One good cosmic measure Science 345 1001–2

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Houk K N and Cheong P H-Y 2008 Computational prediction of small-molecule catalysts Nature 455 309–13

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Skipper M, Dhand R and Campbell P 2012 Presenting ENCODE Nature 489 45

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Kim S, Lee D, Liu X, Van Neste C, Jeon S and Thundat T 2013 Molecular recognition using receptor-free nanomechanical infrared spectroscopy based on a quantum cascade laser Sci. Rep. 3 1111

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Hitchner J R 2017 Financial Valuation (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

[1]

Yen E H and Leonard A R 2015 Nutrition in Cystic Fibrosis: A Guide for Clinicians (Cham: Springer International Publishing)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Yoshida Y 2008 Aggregated Mean Ratios of an Interval Induced from Aggregation Operations Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence: 5th International Conference, MDAI 2008 Sabadell, Spain, October 30-31, 2008. Proceedings Lecture Notes in Computer Science ed V Torra and Y Narukawa (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer) pp 26–37

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]

Davis J 2015 France Deploys Team Of Hunters To Control Wolf Numbers 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 1997 Resources, Community, and Economic Development Information Systems Issue Area--Active Assignments (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]

McIlwain C J 2017 Defense Institutional Building - Integrating the Work Doctoral dissertation (College Park, MD: University of Maryland, College Park)

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]

Brantley B 2016 A Weird Wedding Night. And Then … 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 title	Reports on Progress in Physics
Abbreviation	Rep. Prog. Phys.
ISSN (print)	0034-4885
ISSN (online)	1361-6633
Scope	General Physics and Astronomy