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

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

J. A. Hubbell, Materials science. Enhancing drug function, Science 300, 595 (2003).

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

C. T. Bauch and A. P. Galvani, Epidemiology. Social factors in epidemiology, Science 342, 47 (2013).

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

I.-U. Park, M. W. Peacey, and M. R. Munafò, Modelling the effects of subjective and objective decision making in scientific peer review, Nature 506, 93 (2014).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

F. Tonolini, S. Chan, M. Agnew, A. Lindsay, and J. Leach, Reconstructing high-dimensional two-photon entangled states via compressive sensing, Sci. Rep. 4, 6542 (2014).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

C. Harris, Electricity Markets (John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Oxford, UK, 2006).

An edited book

[1]

R. G. de Almeida and C. Manouilidou, editors , Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing (Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015).

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A. Gálvez, R. L. López, R. P. Pulido, and M. J. G. Burgos, Biopreservation of Meats and Meat Products, in Food Biopreservation, edited by M. J. Grande Burgos, R. Lucas López, and R. Pérez Pulido (Springer, New York, NY, 2014), pp. 23–47.

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 Research.

Blog post

[1]

J. O`Callaghan, Hyperloop One Performs First Test Of Groundbreaking Technology, https://www.iflscience.com/technology/hyperloop-one-performs-first-test-groundbreaking-technology/.

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, Truck Safety: Share the Road Safely Program Needs Better Evaluation of Its Initiatives, No. GAO-03-680, U.S. Government Printing Office, 2003.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

E. D. Wood, A Study of the Effect of Grouping Students and Results on the Ohio Achievement Assessment for Reading, Doctoral dissertation, Capella University, 2017.

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]

G. Vecsey, Sports Take Him Away; Smells Bring Him Home, New York Times SP9 (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 Research
ISSN (online)	2643-1564
Scope