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

Kuo, A.D. (2005). Biophysics. Harvesting energy by improving the economy of human walking. Science 309: 1686–1687.

A journal article with 2 authors

Garrett, S., and Rosenthal, J.J.C. (2012). RNA editing underlies temperature adaptation in K+ channels from polar octopuses. Science 335: 848–851.

A journal article with 3 authors

Chisholm, S.W., Falkowski, P.G., and Cullen, J.J. (2001). Oceans. Dis-crediting ocean fertilization. Science 294: 309–310.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Li, Y., Ji, S., Gao, Y., Luo, H., and Kanehira, M. (2013). Core-shell VO2@TiO2 nanorods that combine thermochromic and photocatalytic properties for application as energy-saving smart coatings. Sci. Rep. 3: 1370.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Connors, L.A., and Alvarez, C. (2012). How Markets Really Work (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

An edited book

(2013). JIMD Reports - Volume 11 (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer).

A chapter in an edited book

Weeks, S.R., and Tsao, J.W. (2012). Sports Concussion. In Traumatic Brain Injury: A Clinician’s Guide to Diagnosis, Management, and Rehabilitation, J.W. Tsao, ed. (New York, NY: Springer), pp 89–101.

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

Andrew, D. (2016). The Big Picture Of The Universe Reveals The Family Tree Of Galaxies (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 (1997). Aviation Insurance: Issues Related to the Reauthorization of FAA’s Aviation Insurance Program (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

Holloway, C.M. (2015). Evaluating five leadership traits in the rising stars succession planning program. Doctoral dissertation. University of Phoenix.

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

Pilon, M. (2013). At the End, the Telltale Runners’ Bags. New York Times D6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kuo, 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Kuo, 2005; Garrett and Rosenthal, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Garrett and Rosenthal, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Li 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