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

Smaglik, P. (2002). Talent tug-of-war. Nature 417: 3.

A journal article with 2 authors

Reichenbach, A., and Pannicke, T. (2008). Neuroscience. A new glance at glia. Science 322: 693–694.

A journal article with 3 authors

Mitchell, A., Wei, P., and Lim, W.A. (2015). Oscillatory stress stimulation uncovers an Achilles’ heel of the yeast MAPK signaling network. Science 350: 1379–1383.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Brown, P., Sutikna, T., Morwood, M.J., Soejono, R.P., Jatmiko, Saptomo, E.W., et al. (2004). A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia. Nature 431: 1055–1061.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Tue, N.V., Reichel, M., and Fischer, M. (2016). Berechnung und Bemessung von Betonbrücken (Berlin, Germany: Wilhelm Ernst & Sohn, Verlag für Architektur und technische Wissenschaften GmbH & Co. KG).

An edited book

(2013). Complex Human Dynamics: From Mind to Societies (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer).

A chapter in an edited book

Kim, J. (2014). Image Enhancement for Improving Object Recognition. In Algorithm & SoC Design for Automotive Vision Systems: For Smart Safe Driving System, J. Kim, and H. Shin, eds. (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands), pp 73–106.

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, E. (2015). What Colors Were Dinosaur Eggs? (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 (1991). Perkins Student Loans: Options That Could Make the Program More Financially Independent (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

Peterson, N.R. (2015). Subspecies composition, genetic variation and structure of Largemouth Bass in Puerto Rico reservoirs. Doctoral dissertation. Mississippi 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

Crow, K. (2002). Mystery of the Missing Tenants. New York Times 146.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smaglik, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Smaglik, 2002; Reichenbach and Pannicke, 2008).

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

Two authors: (Reichenbach and Pannicke, 2008)
Three or more authors: (Brown et al., 2004)

About the journal

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

Research and Writing Guides