How to format your references using the Pharmacological Research citation style

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

N.H. Steneck, Research ethics. Global research integrity training, Science. 340 (2013) 552–553.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

K. Tamura, P. Schimmel, Chiral-selective aminoacylation of an RNA minihelix, Science. 305 (2004) 1253.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

S.T. Turvey, O.R. Green, R.N. Holdaway, Cortical growth marks reveal extended juvenile development in New Zealand moa, Nature. 435 (2005) 940–943.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

K.V. Sreekanth, K.H. Krishna, A. De Luca, G. Strangi, Large spontaneous emission rate enhancement in grating coupled hyperbolic metamaterials, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 6340.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

The American Ceramic Society, Progress in Nanotechnology, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2009.

An edited book

[1]

K. Freeman, B. Elmegreen, D. Block, M. Woolway, eds., Lessons from the Local Group: A Conference in honour of David Block and Bruce Elmegreen, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

R.C.-W. Phan, J.N. Whitley, D.J. Parish, Adversarial Security: Getting to the Root of the Problem, in: J. Camenisch, V. Kisimov, M. Dubovitskaya (Eds.), Open Research Problems in Network Security: IFIP WG 11.4 International Workshop, INetSec 2010, Sofia, Bulgaria, March 5-6, 2010, Revised Selected Papers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011: pp. 47–55.

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 Pharmacological Research.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Warming Seas Will Set Marine Life On The Move, With Some Good News Among The Bad, 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, Federal Student Aid Formula: Cost-of-Living Adjustment Could Increase Aid to a Small Percentage of Students in High-Cost Areas but Could Also Further Complicate Aid Process, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2009.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

C.M. Chapple, A: Application of Polymeric Quaternary Ammonium Surfactant Clay Intercalates in Triphase Catalysis B: Effect of Various Compatibilizers in Polymer-Clay Nanocomposites, Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University, 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

[1]

M.R. Gordon, Inside the American Air War Over Syria: A High Altitude ‘Poker Game,’ New York Times. (2017) A7.

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	Pharmacological Research
Abbreviation	Pharmacol. Res.
ISSN (print)	1043-6618
Scope	Pharmacology