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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Philosophical Transactions 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

DeMello AJ. 2006 Control and detection of chemical reactions in microfluidic systems. Nature 442, 394–402.

A journal article with 2 authors

Blander JM, Amsen D. 2009 Immunology. Amino acid addiction. Science 324, 1282–1283.

A journal article with 3 authors

Ghaffari HO, Nasseri MHB, Young RP. 2014 Faulting of rocks in a three-dimensional stress field by micro-anticracks. Sci. Rep. 4, 5011.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Narayanaswamy N, Kumar M, Das S, Sharma R, Samanta PK, Pati SK, Dhar SK, Kundu TK, Govindaraju T. 2014 A thiazole coumarin (TC) turn-on fluorescence probe for AT-base pair detection and multipurpose applications in different biological systems. Sci. Rep. 4, 6476.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Franco P. 2014 Understanding Bitcoin. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Hansen BC, Bray GA, editors. 2008 The Metabolic Syndrome: Epidemiology Clinical Treatment and Underlying Mechanisms. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press.

A chapter in an edited book

Baco E, Berge V, Rud E. 2015 How Do We Select Patients Eligible for Focal Therapy? Imaging and Targeted Biopsies: A Basic Prerequisite for Focal Therapy. In Focal Therapy of Prostate Cancer: An Emerging Strategy for Minimally Invasive, Staged Treatment (eds S Thüroff, CG Chaussy), pp. 39–49. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

Blog post

Luntz S. 2015 Black Hole’s Powerful Magnetic Field Observed For First Time. 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

Government Accountability Office. 1999 Space Station: Cost to Operate After Assembly is Uncertain.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Chavez TM. 2008 A quasi-experimental study of the relationship between school structure and student outcomes. Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ.

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

Fox M. 2009 Boris Pokrovsky, 97, Bolshoi Director. New York Times, 6 June. , A19.

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	Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A
Abbreviation	Philos. Trans. A Math. Phys. Eng. Sci.
ISSN (print)	1364-503X
ISSN (online)	1471-2962
Scope	General Engineering General Mathematics General Physics and Astronomy