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]

J. Javanainen, Physics. Bose-Einstein condensates interfere and survive, Science 307 (2005) 1883–1885.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

A. Mougi, M. Kondoh, Diversity of interaction types and ecological community stability, Science 337 (2012) 349–351.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

M. Meschke, W. Guichard, J.P. Pekola, Single-mode heat conduction by photons, Nature 444 (2006) 187–190.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

R.P. Seal, X. Wang, Y. Guan, S.N. Raja, C.J. Woodbury, A.I. Basbaum, R.H. Edwards, Injury-induced mechanical hypersensitivity requires C-low threshold mechanoreceptors, Nature 462 (2009) 651–655.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

G. Yin, Clinical Trial Design: Bayesian and Frequentist Adaptive Methods, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2011.

An edited book

[1]

B. Barbara, Y. Imry, G. Sawatzky, P.C.E. Stamp, eds., Quantum Magnetism, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2008.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

V.K. Bykovsky, Data-Driven Modeling of Complex Systems, in: A. Minai, D. Braha, Y. Bar-Yam (Eds.), Unifying Themes in Complex Systems: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Complex Systems, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008: pp. 34–41.

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]

A. Carpineti, Snow Features On Pluto Are Similar To Some We Find On Earth, IFLScience (2017). https://www.iflscience.com/space/snow-features-on-pluto-are-similar-to-some-we-find-on-earth/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Drug Abuse Control Program Activities in Okinawa, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1972.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

B. Barger, A Quantitative Study of Educational Poverty, School Location, and Student Achievement Measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Doctoral dissertation, Lindenwood University, 2014.

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]

G. Vecsey, Memories Translate Well for Lendl, New York Times (2010) D3.

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