How to format your references using the Current Opinion in Pharmacology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Current Opinion in Pharmacology. 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

Blakely RD: Neurobiology. Dopamine’s reversal of fortune. Science 2001, 293:2407–2409.

A journal article with 2 authors

Egnatchik RA, DeBerardinis RJ: Metabolism: Growth in the fat lane. Nature 2015, 520:165–166.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kuba H, Oichi Y, Ohmori H: Presynaptic activity regulates Na(+) channel distribution at the axon initial segment. Nature 2010, 465:1075–1078.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Abanin DA, Morozov SV, Ponomarenko LA, Gorbachev RV, Mayorov AS, Katsnelson MI, Watanabe K, Taniguchi T, Novoselov KS, Levitov LS, et al.: Giant nonlocality near the Dirac point in graphene. Science 2011, 332:328–330.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Abd-El-Barr M, El-Rewini H: Fundamentals of Computer Organization and Architecture. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2004.

An edited book

Čomić L: Morphological Modeling of Terrains and Volume Data. Springer; 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

Francesconi A, Dossena C: A Strategic and Organizational Perspective for Understanding the Evolution of Online Reputation Management Systems. In From Information to Smart Society: Environment, Politics and Economics. Edited by Mola L, Pennarola F, Za S. Springer International Publishing; 2015:49–61.

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 Current Opinion in Pharmacology.

Blog post

Fang J: Tooth Enamel Could Have Originated On Prehistoric Fish Scales. IFLScience 2015,

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: Federal Short Takeoff and Landing Transport Programs: Status and Needs. U.S. Government Printing Office; 1976.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Chung Y-K: A comparison of particle swarm optimization algorithms in data clustering. 2010,

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

Oren MB: The Iran Deal Isn’t Worth Saving. New York Times 2017,

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Current Opinion in Pharmacology
Abbreviation	Curr. Opin. Pharmacol.
ISSN (print)	1471-4892
ISSN (online)	1471-4973
Scope	Drug Discovery Pharmacology