Guides: Physics: Writing and citing

Citation management software

EndNote - Build your personal database of references, organize them into groups, find and attach the full text of papers, and insert bibliographic citations in your papers in your chosen style.
- Guide to using EndNote
- EndNote Essentials workshops are offered throughout the year.
- EndNote Web - Sync between the software and online version of EndNote. Create an account from a computer on the McGill network.
Zotero - McGill Library provides support for this online citation tool.
- Watch a Zotero video tutorial.

Citing in LaTeX

Overleaf - Online LaTeX tool with templates. Overleaf and EndNote (above) make a great pair.
JabRef - Open source bibliography reference manager. The native file format used by JabRef is BibTeX, the standard LaTeX bibliography format.
- Guide to using JabRef
LaTeX Wikibooks is a great resource for bibliography management (and all things LaTeX)
Free online introduction to LaTeX (Overleaf)

Citing responsibly

It is important to think about who you are crediting in your work, and recognize bias, power, and privilege in academic scholarship.

Follow this short citational politics training module from CLEAR to understand how your citations have power.
Your article passes the Gray test if you cite and discuss the scholarship of at least two women and two non-white people.

Readings:

Teich, E. G., Kim, J. Z., Lynn, C. W., Simon, S. C., Klishin, A. A., Szymula, K. P., Srivastava, P., Bassett, L. C., Zurn, P., Dworkin, J. D., & Bassett, D. S. (2022). Citation inequity and gendered citation practices in contemporary physics. Nature Physics, 18(10), 1161-1170. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01770-1
Day, A., Corbett, P., & Boyle, J. (2020). Is there a gender gap in chemical sciences scholarly communication? Chemical Science, 11(8), 2277-2301. https://doi.org/10.1039/C9SC04090K
Mihaljević-Brandt, H., Santamaría, L., & Tullney, M. (2016). The effect of gender in the publication patterns in mathematics. PLoS One, 11(10), e0165367. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0165367

Find more readings on our Impact Measurements Guide.

AIP citation style

American Institute of Physics (AIP) citation style is commonly used for papers in physics. With AIP style, literature references are usually numbered by order of appearance (with superscripted numbers after the punctuation in the text) and listed in that order at the end of the article.