Citation Format

Beginning with Vol. 86, Issue 1 (3 January 2005), Applied Physics Letters (APL) switched from a citation format based on page numbers to one based on six-digit citation identifiers (CIDs). At the same time, APL began publishing issues online in an article-at-a-time publication mode. The CID chosen for Applied Physics Letters is similar to that used by Physical Review. Use of CIDs in place of traditional page numbers allows an issue to build online one article at a time while retaining the ability to segment tables of contents by article type or subject area; this accelerates online publication of articles, which are published online individually as soon as author proof corrections are incorporated. Utilization of CIDs also allows articles to be fully citable as soon as they are published online, using the same identifier for both online and print versions.

The structure of the six-digit citation identifier is defined as follows:

• first two digits indicate the issue number
• middle two digits: indicate the article type and/or subject area
• last two digits: assigned according to publication order, within that issue and section

Example:

An example of the correct citation format for an article in Applied Physics Letters is:

A. Smith and B. Jones, Appl. Phys. Lett. 86, 023507 (2005).

In this fictitious example, the article by Smith and Jones was published in APL in Issue 2 of Volume 86, as the seventh article published in section 35, which for APL Vol. 86 is, "Device Physics."

In the full-text PDF file available online and in the printed article, the CID appears on each printed page. Appended at the end of the CID is a hyphen followed by a consecutive page number. For the sample article above, the printed pages would carry this page numbering: 023507-1, 023507-2, 023507-3, etc. The hyphen and additional digits should not be used when citing or searching for an article.

Definitions of this journal's current article type and subject area code numbers (the middle two digits of the CID) can be accessed through the links below: