March 2024

Supplemental Material Instructions

Supplemental Material (SM) is useful information that is not essential to understanding an article’s main result, such as multimedia, parameters used in or produced by calculations, derivation of equations as well as additional technical details on the work performed. All Physical Review journals provide a platform for Supplemental Material deposited as electronic files.

• Movies linked to from the manuscript should be deposited as SM in order to provide a permanent, stable link for these files.
• There is no charge associated with SM.
• SM should not be used to avoid a length limit, since any article must be convincing without it.
• In regular research articles, which have no length limit, technical details in the SM may be better suited for an Appendix within the paper. Editors will work with authors to find the best option.
• All references cited in the SM should be listed in the reference section of the main text.
• In general, SM should not accompany Comments, Replies, or Errata.
• SM is subject to the same copyright agreement as the associated paper. Follow the guidelines in the copyright agreement for the published manuscript when replicating information included in the SM.
• SM files will not be copyedited or altered by APS after submission and should therefore be submitted in a format ready to be published. Authors will not receive page proofs of this material.
• Revisions to SM files after publication are possible but discouraged. SM revisions are subject to the same criteria as Corrections.

Preparation of files

Please choose filenames with care, as the name will appear on the published files. These file formats are acceptable for Physical Review journals. PDF is the recommended format for text documents. If possible, add the title of the manuscript and the author list to the top of all files, as they are often downloaded and stored separately and should therefore be self-contained. The “Description” field of the README.TXT file, which must accompany each deposit, is displayed prominently at the top of the Supplemental Material section on the paper’s landing page.

How to deposit

Electronic files should be uploaded as part of a manuscript submission via our submission server. During the process there will be prompts to enter important information about the deposit for the end user, such as file type, installation instructions, minimum requirements, etc. Revised SM should also be resubmitted using our submissions server.

Citation in article

Authors should ensure that the journal article contains a single numbered reference in the reference list using this format:

[20] See Supplemental Material at [URL will be inserted by publisher] for [give brief description of material].

and that the reference number is cited in the main text.

References contained in the SM should also appear in the reference section of the main paper. In the main text, they may appear as regular citations when the sources are mentioned or cited via the SM reference or in this way:

"... in the Supplemental Material [20] (see also references [21–24] therein).”

To cite them via the SM reference in the reference list:

[20] See Supplemental Material [url] for [brief description], which includes Refs. [21-24].
[21] [first reference in Supplemental Material not already cited in paper].
[22] [next reference in Supplemental Material not already cited in paper].
[23] [next reference in Supplemental Material not already cited in paper].
[24] [last reference in Supplemental Material not already cited in paper].

Storage/Retrieval

All files related to an article will be stored as a single deposit and will be assigned an SM URL. This will appear in the article's reference list, which will link to the supplemental file(s) via a separate SM section on the article’s online landing page.