How to format your references using the Physics Education citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Physics Education. 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]

Mallet J 2007 Hybrid speciation Nature 446 279–83

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Conrad C P and Lithgow-Bertelloni C 2002 How mantle slabs drive plate tectonics Science 298 207–9

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Eagleman D M, Jacobson J E and Sejnowski T J 2004 Perceived luminance depends on temporal context Nature 428 854–6

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Haffner C, Chelladurai D, Fedoryshyn Y, Josten A, Baeuerle B, Heni W, Watanabe T, Cui T, Cheng B, Saha S, Elder D L, Dalton L R, Boltasseva A, Shalaev V M, Kinsey N and Leuthold J 2018 Low-loss plasmon-assisted electro-optic modulator Nature 556 483–6

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Goudon T 2016 Mathematics for Modeling and Scientific Computing (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

[1]

Cai T and Bjerklund Johansen T E 2016 Prostatitis and Its Management: Concepts and Recommendations for Clinical Practice (Cham: Springer International Publishing)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Räikkä J 2008 Autonomy and Genetic Privacy Genetic Democracy: Philosophical Perspectives International Library Of Ethics, Law, And The New Medicine ed V Launis and J Räikkä (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands) pp 43–51

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 Physics Education.

Blog post

[1]

Andrews R 2015 One Quarter Of The World Will Be Powered By Renewable Energy By 2020 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 1988 Aircraft Noise: Implementation of FAA’s Expanded East Coast Plan (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]

Choi K K 2010 Conspiracy and alternative crimes in the Military Commissions Act of 2009: Is There a Way Out? Doctoral dissertation (Washington, DC: George Washington University)

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]

Risen J 2016 Trump Can Target Journalists, Thanks to Obama New York Times SR3

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	Physics Education
Abbreviation	Phys. Educ.
ISSN (print)	0031-9120
ISSN (online)	1361-6552
Scope	General Physics and Astronomy Education