How to format your references using the British Journal of Pharmacology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for British Journal of Pharmacology (BJP). For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Download the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

Bowles, S. (2006). Group competition, reproductive leveling, and the evolution of human altruism. Science 314: 1569–1572.

A journal article with 2 authors

Mühlenbruch, B., and Jochimsen, M.A. (2013). Research policy: Only wholesale reform will bring equality. Nature 495: 40–42.

A journal article with 3 authors

Brown, C.D., Johnson, D.S., and Sidow, A. (2007). Functional architecture and evolution of transcriptional elements that drive gene coexpression. Science 317: 1557–1560.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Thibault, P., Dierolf, M., Menzel, A., Bunk, O., David, C., and Pfeiffer, F. (2008). High-resolution scanning x-ray diffraction microscopy. Science 321: 379–382.

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Wernecke, R. (2003). Industrielle Feuchtemessung (Weinheim, FRG: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA).

An edited book

Jovane, F. (2009). The ManuFuture Road: Towards Competitive and Sustainable High-Adding-Value Manufacturing (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer).

A chapter in an edited book

Kressner, D., and Macedo, F. (2014). Low-Rank Tensor Methods for Communicating Markov Processes. In Quantitative Evaluation of Systems: 11th International Conference, QEST 2014, Florence, Italy, September 8-10, 2014. Proceedings, G. Norman, and W. Sanders, eds. (Cham: Springer International Publishing), pp 25–40.

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for British Journal of Pharmacology.

Blog post

Davis, J. (2016). New Gene Therapy For Treating Genetic Blindness Offers Hope For Cure (IFLScience).

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office (1994). Immigrant Education: Federal Funding Has Not Kept Pace With Student Increases (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office).

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Mosbacker, H.L. (2008). Control of Electrical Transport Mechanisms at Metal-Zinc Oxide Interfaces by Subsurface Defect Engineering with Remote Plasma Treatment. Doctoral dissertation. Ohio State University.

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Walsh, M.W. (2017). Car Insurers Facing Rush Of Claims After Storm. New York Times B4.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Bowles, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Bowles, 2006; Mühlenbruch and Jochimsen, 2013).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Mühlenbruch and Jochimsen, 2013)
Three or more authors: (Thibault et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	British Journal of Pharmacology
Abbreviation	Br. J. Pharmacol.
ISSN (print)	0007-1188
ISSN (online)	1476-5381
Scope	Pharmacology