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

McGill, B.J., 2006. Ecology. A renaissance in the study of abundance. Science 314, 770–772.

A journal article with 2 authors

Sonderegger, P., Patthy, L., 2007. Comment on “Tequila, a neurotrypsin ortholog, regulates long-term memory formation in Drosophila.” Science 316, 1698; author reply 1698.

A journal article with 3 authors

Collins, F.S., Wilder, E.L., Zerhouni, E., 2014. Funding transdisciplinary research. NIH Roadmap/Common Fund at 10 years. Science 345, 274–276.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Thirumalai, K., Richey, J.N., Quinn, T.M., Poore, R.Z., 2014. Globigerinoides ruber morphotypes in the Gulf of Mexico: a test of null hypothesis. Sci. Rep. 4, 6018.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Schwartz, D., 2010. The Future of Finance. John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte. Ltd., 2 Clementi Loop, #02-01, Singapore 129809.

An edited book

Brueckner, S.A., Marzo Serugendo, G.D., Karageorgos, A., Nagpal, R. (Eds.), 2005. Engineering Self-Organising Systems: Methodologies and Applications, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Har-Peled, S., Koltun, V., 2005. Separability with Outliers, in: Deng, X., Du, D.-Z. (Eds.), Algorithms and Computation: 16th International Symposium, ISAAC 2005, Sanya, Hainan, China, December 19-21, 2005. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 28–39.

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

Hamilton, K., 2016. Four little-known EU rules which help protect Britain’s environment [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/environment/four-little-known-eu-rules-which-help-protect-britains-environment/ (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, 1997. Highway Funding: The Federal Highway Administration’s Funding Apportionment Model (No. RCED-97-159). 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

Kim, G., 2013. Development of a nutrition-based curriculum for farm-to-school programs for the fourth and fifth grades (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

Walsh, M.W., 2016. Puerto Rico Debt Plan Prioritizes Pensions. New York Times B1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (McGill, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (McGill, 2006; Sonderegger and Patthy, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Sonderegger and Patthy, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Thirumalai et al., 2014)

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