How to format your references using the Operational Research citation style

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

Gershon D (2004) In the market-place. Nature 432:243–245

A journal article with 2 authors

Song G, Zhang W (2014) First-principles study on the phase diagram and multiferroic properties of (SrCoO3)1/(SrTiO3)1 superlattices. Sci Rep 4:4564

A journal article with 3 authors

Storch NI, Anderson KR, Lai D (2014) Chaotic dynamics of stellar spin in binaries and the production of misaligned hot Jupiters. Science 345:1317–1321

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Inagaki S, Guan S, Ohsuna T, Terasaki O (2002) An ordered mesoporous organosilica hybrid material with a crystal-like wall structure. Nature 416:304–307

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Juhnke GA, Granello DH, Granello PF (2010) Suicide, Self-Injury, and Violence in the Schools. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Neustein A, Markowitz JA (eds) (2013) Mobile Speech and Advanced Natural Language Solutions. Springer, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Nunes BG, Costa JP, Godinho P (2013) On the Application of AHP to the Diagnostic of Portuguese SME. In: Hernández JE, Liu S, Delibašić B, et al. (eds) Decision Support Systems II - Recent Developments Applied to DSS Network Environments: Euro Working Group Workshop, EWG-DSS 2012, Liverpool, UK, April 12-13, 2012, and Vilnius, Lithuania, July 8-11, 2012, Revised Selected and Extended Papers. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 57–71

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 Operational Research.

Blog post

Potvin S (2017) New Species Of Flying Squirrel Discovered In North America. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/new-species-of-flying-squirrel-discovered-in-north-america/. Accessed 30 Oct 2018

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 (1996) Transportation Issue Area Plan--Fiscal Years 1995-97. 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

Serrano M (2017) Bilingual Sentiment Analysis of Spanglish Tweets. Doctoral dissertation, Florida Atlantic 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

de la MERCED MJ, Drape J (2017) Co-Founder of Alibaba Is Said to Buy a 49 Percent Stake in the Nets. New York Times D1

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gershon 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Gershon 2004; Song and Zhang 2014).

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

Two authors: (Song and Zhang 2014)
Three or more authors: (Inagaki et al. 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Operational Research
ISSN (print)	1109-2858
ISSN (online)	1866-1505
Scope	Management of Technology and Innovation Strategy and Management Computational Theory and Mathematics Management Science and Operations Research Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty Modelling and Simulation Numerical Analysis