How to format your references using the Physical Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Physical Biology. 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 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

[1]

Clark P U 2012 Climate change. Ice sheets in transition Science 337 656–8

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Velicogna I and Wahr J 2006 Acceleration of Greenland ice mass loss in spring 2004 Nature 443 329–31

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Martin A A, Toth M and Aharonovich I 2014 Subtractive 3D printing of optically active diamond structures Sci. Rep. 4 5022

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Styer K L, Singh V, Macosko E, Steele S E, Bargmann C I and Aballay A 2008 Innate immunity in Caenorhabditis elegans is regulated by neurons expressing NPR-1/GPCR Science 322 460–4

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Mohos F Á 2017 Confectionery and Chocolate Engineering (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

[1]

Férard J-F and Blaise C 2013 Encyclopedia of Aquatic Ecotoxicology (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Hayman C 2014 Maximizing the Potential of Locally Led Peacebuilding in Conflict Affected States Is Local Beautiful?: Peacebuilding between International Interventions and Locally Led Initiatives SpringerBriefs in Environment, Security, Development and Peace ed S Hellmüller and M Santschi (Cham: Springer International Publishing) pp 65–77

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 Physical Biology.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew E 2014 Volcanoes May Have Heated Mars To Make Liquid Water Possible 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 1995 Scenic Byways: States’ Use of Geometric Design Standards (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]

Di Giacomo F A 2010 Education amidst transition: The case of Romania 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, Green J and Soloski A 2017 Too Soon? Or Right on Cue? New York Times AR1

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	Physical Biology
Abbreviation	Phys. Biol.
ISSN (print)	1478-3967
ISSN (online)	1478-3975
Scope	Biophysics Cell Biology Molecular Biology Structural Biology