How to format your references using the Operations Research Letters citation style

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

[1]

M.D. Ward, Materials science. Molecular fuel tanks, Science. 300 (2003) 1104–1105.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

S. Scheuring, J.N. Sturgis, Chromatic adaptation of photosynthetic membranes, Science. 309 (2005) 484–487.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

A.H. Wilson, S.B. Shirey, R.W. Carlson, Archaean ultra-depleted komatiites formed by hydrous melting of cratonic mantle, Nature. 423 (2003) 858–861.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

J. Repp, G. Meyer, S. Paavilainen, F.E. Olsson, M. Persson, Imaging bond formation between a gold atom and pentacene on an insulating surface, Science. 312 (2006) 1196–1199.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

T.J. Morrison, Functional Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2000.

An edited book

[1]

J.W. Tweedale, R. Neves-Silva, L.C. Jain, G. Phillips-Wren, J. Watada, R.J. Howlett, eds., Intelligent Decision Technology Support in Practice, 1st ed. 2016, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

V.P. Sergienko, S.N. Bukharov, Friction-Excited Self-oscillations, in: S.N. Bukharov (Ed.), Noise and Vibration in Friction Systems, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015: pp. 83–132.

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 Operations Research Letters.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Seven New Genes Linked To Anxiety Disorders, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, The SEASAT-A Project: Where It Stands Today, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1977.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

E.J. Del Cid, Services for immigrant families with children in the child welfare system: A grant proposal project, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2009.

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

[1]

J. Schwartz, A Climate Change Evangelist, New York Times. (2016) D1.

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	Operations Research Letters
Abbreviation	Oper. Res. Lett.
ISSN (print)	0167-6377
Scope	Software Management Science and Operations Research Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Applied Mathematics