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

Lawler, A. (2011). Archaeology. Preserving history, one hill at a time. Science 334: 1623.

A journal article with 2 authors

Braine, J., and Herpin, F. (2004). Molecular hydrogen beyond the optical edge of an isolated spiral galaxy. Nature 432: 369–371.

A journal article with 3 authors

Burlaga, L.F., Ness, N.F., and Stone, E.C. (2013). Magnetic field observations as Voyager 1 entered the heliosheath depletion region. Science 341: 147–150.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Karki, K.J., Ma, F., Zheng, K., Zidek, K., Mousa, A., Abdellah, M.A., et al. (2013). Multiple exciton generation in nano-crystals revisited: consistent calculation of the yield based on pump-probe spectroscopy. Sci. Rep. 3: 2287.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Benchaib, A. (2015). Advanced Control of AC/DC Power Networks (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

An edited book

Wang, E. (2014). High-Performance Computing on the Intel® Xeon Phi^TM: How to Fully Exploit MIC Architectures (Cham: Springer International Publishing).

A chapter in an edited book

Qiu, X., Zhou, J., and Huang, X. (2011). An Effective Feature Selection Method for Text Categorization. In Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: 15th Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2011, Shenzhen, China, May 24-27, 2011, Proceedings, Part I, J.Z. Huang, L. Cao, and J. Srivastava, eds. (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), pp 50–61.

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

Hale, T. (2016). Mysterious Metal Object Crash Lands At A Jade Mine In Myanmar (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 (2002). School Vouchers: Characteristics of Privately Funded Programs (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

Rosales, J.K. (2009). California’s three strikes law: A policy analysis. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach.

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

Whiteside, K. (2017). Trying to Find a Sneaker Named For a W.N.B.A. Star? Keep Looking. New York Times B7.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lawler, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Braine and Herpin, 2004; Lawler, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Braine and Herpin, 2004)
Three or more authors: (Karki et al., 2013)

About the journal

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