How to format your references using the Business Research citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Business Research. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Bolfan-Casanova, Nathalie. 2007. Geochemistry. Fuel for plate tectonics. Science (New York, N.Y.) 315: 338–339.

A journal article with 2 authors

Ashlin, Alison, and Richard J. Ladle. 2006. Science communication. Environmental science adrift in the blogosphere. Science (New York, N.Y.) 312: 201.

A journal article with 3 authors

Shinde, Dhanraj B., Mainak Majumder, and Vijayamohanan K. Pillai. 2014. Counter-ion dependent, longitudinal unzipping of multi-walled carbon nanotubes to highly conductive and transparent graphene nanoribbons. Scientific reports 4: 4363.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Wendel, Hans-Guido, Elisa De Stanchina, Jordan S. Fridman, Abba Malina, Sagarika Ray, Scott Kogan, Carlos Cordon-Cardo, Jerry Pelletier, and Scott W. Lowe. 2004. Survival signalling by Akt and eIF4E in oncogenesis and cancer therapy. Nature 428: 332–337.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Straus, Sharon E., and David L. Sackett. 2013. Mentorship in Academic Medicine. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Bouchachia, Abdelhamid, ed. 2014. Adaptive and Intelligent Systems: Third International Conference, ICAIS 2014, Bournemouth, UK, September 8-10, 2014. Proceedings. Vol. 8779. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Yu, Yi, Roger Zimmermann, and Suhua Tang. 2015. Social Interactions over Location-Aware Multimedia Systems. In Multimedia Data Mining and Analytics: Disruptive Innovation, ed. Aaron K. Baughman, Jiang Gao, Jia-Yu Pan, and Valery A. Petrushin, 117–146. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Business Research.

Blog post

Hamilton, Kristy. 2016. Lift-Off For NASA Mission To Collect Grains From An Asteroid That May Be On Collision Course With Earth. IFLScience. IFLScience. September 12.

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. 1998. Year 2000 Computing Crisis: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Efforts to Ensure Bank Systems Are Year 2000 Compliant. T-AIMD-98-73. 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

Mark, Mercedes. 2017. A peer mentorship program for youth transitioning out of foster care: A grant proposal. Doctoral dissertation, Long Beach, CA: 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

Gimenez, Sophia. 2011. When a Decision Letter Is From Mom’s Alma Mater. New York Times, April 7.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Bolfan-Casanova 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Ashlin and Ladle 2006; Bolfan-Casanova 2007).

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

Two authors: (Ashlin and Ladle 2006)
Three or more authors: (Wendel et al. 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	Business Research
Abbreviation	Bus. Res.
ISSN (print)	2198-3402
ISSN (online)	2198-2627
Scope