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.
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.
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.
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].
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.