How to format your references using the Computers and Operations Research citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Computers and Operations 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	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

Kivelson, M.G., 2006. Does Enceladus govern magnetospheric dynamics at Saturn? Science 311, 1391–1392.

A journal article with 2 authors

Lionetti, D., Agapie, T., 2014. Inorganic chemistry: How calcium affects oxygen formation. Nature 513, 495–496.

A journal article with 3 authors

Khalil, A.M., Cambier, J.C., Shlomchik, M.J., 2012. B cell receptor signal transduction in the GC is short-circuited by high phosphatase activity. Science 336, 1178–1181.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

McMillan, A.R., Labonté, L., Clark, A.S., Bell, B., Alibart, O., Martin, A., Wadsworth, W.J., Tanzilli, S., Rarity, J.G., 2013. Two-photon interference between disparate sources for quantum networking. Sci. Rep. 3, 2032.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Minoli, D., 2005. Nanotechnology Applications to Telecommunications and Networking. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Chaudhuri, J., Al-Rubeai, M. (Eds.), 2005. Bioreactors for Tissue Engineering: Principles, Design and Operation. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Guidotti, R., Berlingerio, M., 2016. Where Is My Next Friend? Recommending Enjoyable Profiles in Location Based Services, in: Cherifi, H., Gonçalves, B., Menezes, R., Sinatra, R. (Eds.), Complex Networks VII: Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Complex Networks CompleNet 2016, Studies in Computational Intelligence. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 65–78.

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 Computers and Operations Research.

Blog post

Davis, J., 2015. GM Crops that Produce Fish Oil Successfully Grown in the Field [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/gm-crops-produce-fish-oil-successfully-grown-field/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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. Committee on Governmental Affairs: Alleged Senate Compromise of NASA Complainant’s Identity (No. OSI-94-30). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Bouyer, J., 2017. Temporary Leadership in Athletics: The Experiences of Interim NCAA Directors of Athletics (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Greenhouse, L., 2007. Supreme Court to Hear Appeal Of Mexican Death Row Inmate. New York Times A16.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kivelson, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Kivelson, 2006; Lionetti and Agapie, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Lionetti and Agapie, 2014)
Three or more authors: (McMillan et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Computers and Operations Research
Abbreviation	Comput. Oper. Res.
ISSN (print)	0305-0548
Scope	General Computer Science Management Science and Operations Research Modelling and Simulation