Citation Format

Beginning with Vol. 76, Issue 1 (January 2005), Review of Scientific Instruments (RSI) switched from a citation format based on page numbers to one based on six-character citation identifiers (CIDs). At the same time, RSI began publishing issues online in an article-at-a-time publication mode. The CID chosen for Review of Scientific Instruments 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-character citation identifier for RSI is defined as follows:

Definitions of this journal's article type and subject area code numbers (the middle two characters of the CID) can be accessed through the links below. Note that RSI's CID will contain alphanumeric combinations in the middle two characters (of the form A1, A2, A3, etc.) for conference proceedings papers only; for regular papers, purely numeric CIDs will be used:

Example:

An example of the correct citation format for an article in Review of Scientific Instruments is:

A. Smith and B. Jones, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 76, 024103 (2005).

In this fictitious example, the article by Smith and Jones was published in RSI in Issue 2 of Volume 76, as the third article published in section 41, which for RSI Vol. 76 is, "Chemistry."

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: 024103-1, 024103-2, 024103-3, etc. The hyphen and additional digits should not be used when citing or searching for an article.