How to format your references using the The European Physical Journal C citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The European Physical Journal C. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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. G. S. Collins, Science 335, 1176 (2012).
A journal article with 2 authors
1. M. B. Feany and W. W. Bender, Nature 404, 394 (2000).
A journal article with 3 authors
1. D. E. Canfield, S. W. Poulton, and G. M. Narbonne, Science 315, 92 (2007).
A journal article with 4 or more authors
1. H.-S. Tao, Y.-H. Chen, H.-F. Lin, H.-D. Liu, and W.-M. Liu, Sci. Rep. 4, 5367 (2014).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
1. R. A. Ibrahim, Handbook of Structural Life Assessment (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2017).
An edited book
1. J. Asch and A. Joye, editors , Mathematical Physics of Quantum Mechanics: Selected and Refereed Lectures from QMath9 (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006).
A chapter in an edited book
1. I. P. Suzdalev and Y. V. Maksimov, in ICAME 2005: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on the Applications of the Mössbauer Effect (ICAME 2005) Held in Montpellier, France, 4–9 September 2005, Volume I (Part I–II/V), edited by P.-E. Lippens, J.-C. Jumas, and J.-M. R. Génin (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007), pp. 25–35.

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 The European Physical Journal C.

Blog post
1. E. Andrew, IFLScience (2015).

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, Transportation Security Information Sharing: Stakeholders Generally Satisfied but TSA Could Improve Analysis, Awareness, and Accountability (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2011).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
1. K. M. Mayfield, Project Managers’ Experience and Description of Decision Uncertainty Associated with the Agile Software Development Methodology: A Phenomenological Study, Doctoral dissertation, Capella University, 2010.

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. B. Shpigel, New York Times D1 (2016).

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 titleThe European Physical Journal C
AbbreviationEur. Phys. J. C Part. Fields
ISSN (print)1434-6044
ISSN (online)1434-6052
ScopeEngineering (miscellaneous)
Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)

Other styles