How to format your references using the Physical Review Materials citation style

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

D. Ihde, Epistemology engines, Nature 406, 21 (2000).

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

L. Sallan and A. K. Galimberti, Body-size reduction in vertebrates following the end-Devonian mass extinction, Science 350, 812 (2015).

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

B. Wiedenheft, S. H. Sternberg, and J. A. Doudna, RNA-guided genetic silencing systems in bacteria and archaea, Nature 482, 331 (2012).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

A. J. Barbera, J. V. Chodaparambil, B. Kelley-Clarke, V. Joukov, J. C. Walter, K. Luger, and K. M. Kaye, The nucleosomal surface as a docking station for Kaposi’s sarcoma herpesvirus LANA, Science 311, 856 (2006).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

M. W. Allen, Michael Allen’s Guide to e-Learning (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2016).

An edited book

[1]

J. G. de la Garza-Salazar, A. Meneses-Garcia, and C. Arce-Salinas, editors , Inflammatory Breast Cancer (Springer, London, 2013).

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

S. Billett, The Practices of Learning through Occupations, in Learning Through Practice: Models, Traditions, Orientations and Approaches, edited by S. Billett (Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2010), pp. 59–81.

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 Review Materials.

Blog post

[1]

J. Davis, 7 Species Of Bees Granted Endangered Species Protection For The First Time Ever, https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/7-species-of-bees-granted-endangered-species-protection-for-the-first-time-ever/.

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, Highway Safety: Federal and State Efforts Related to Accidents That Involve Non-Commercial Vehicles Carrying Unsecured Loads, No. GAO-13-24, U.S. Government Printing Office, 2012.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

L. A. Wilson, An Exploratory Study of the Impact of School-Wide Positive Behavior Support on Bullying, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2014.

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]

M. Billard, Scouting Report, New York Times E5 (2010).

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 Review Materials
ISSN (online)	2475-9953
Scope