Citation Format

Beginning with Vol. 15, Issue 1 (March 2005) Chaos switched from a citation format based on page numbers to one based on six-digit citation identifiers (CIDs). At the same time, Chaos continued to publish issues online in an article-at-a-time publication mode. The CID chosen for Chaos 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:

Example:

An example of the correct citation format for an article in Chaos is:

A. Smith and B. Jones, Chaos 15, 023705 (2005).

In this fictitious example, the article by Smith and Jones was published in Chaos in Issue 2 of Volume 15, as the fifth article published in section 37, which, for Chaos Vol. 15, is “Pattern Formation, Competition, and Selection.”

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: 023705-1, 023705-2, 023705-3, 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: