How to format your references using the OPSEARCH citation style

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

Leonhardt, U.: Applied physics: cloaking of heat. Nature. 498, 440–441 (2013)

A journal article with 2 authors

Price, D.J., Rosswog, S.: Producing ultrastrong magnetic fields in neutron star mergers. Science. 312, 719–722 (2006)

A journal article with 3 authors

Jaeger, T.F., Pontillo, D., Graff, P.: Comment on “Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa.” Science. 335, 1042; author reply 1042 (2012)

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Gambardella, P., Dallmeyer, A., Maiti, K., Malagoli, M.C., Eberhardt, W., Kern, K., Carbone, C.: Ferromagnetism in one-dimensional monatomic metal chains. Nature. 416, 301–304 (2002)

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Beiser, L.: Unified Optical Scanning Technology. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ (2005)

An edited book

Gueudet, G., Pepin, B., Trouche, L. eds: From Text to “Lived” Resources: Mathematics Curriculum Materials and Teacher Development. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht (2012)

A chapter in an edited book

Schneider, T., Riedel, K.: Environmental Proteomics: Studying Structure and Function of Microbial Communities. In: Barton, L.L., Mandl, M., and Loy, A. (eds.) Geomicrobiology: Molecular and Environmental Perspective. pp. 91–108. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht (2010)

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 OPSEARCH.

Blog post

Hamilton, K.: Why Do Our Friends Want Us To Drink And Dislike It When We Don’t?

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: Children’s Television Act: FCC Could Improve Efforts to Oversee Enforcement and Provide Public Information. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (2011)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Wilson, P.: A Case Study of the Efficacy of Middle College on Educational Advancement, (2015)

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

Crane, A.T., Hay, G., Larsen, P.T.: Mortgage Market Due for Overhaul, (2011)

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	OPSEARCH
Abbreviation	Opsearch
ISSN (print)	0030-3887
ISSN (online)	0975-0320
Scope	Management Information Systems Computer Science Applications Information Systems Management Science and Operations Research