How to format your references using the Pharmacological Reviews citation style

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

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Lupas AN (2014) Protein Design. What I cannot create, I do not understand. Science 346:1455–1456.
A journal article with 2 authors
Tsou M-FB, and Stearns T (2006) Mechanism limiting centrosome duplication to once per cell cycle. Nature 442:947–951.
A journal article with 3 authors
Zeng B, Gao Y, and Bartoli FJ (2013) Ultrathin nanostructured metals for highly transmissive plasmonic subtractive color filters. Sci Rep 3:2840.
A journal article with 99 or more authors
Galletto R, Amitani I, Baskin RJ, and Kowalczykowski SC (2006) Direct observation of individual RecA filaments assembling on single DNA molecules. Nature 443:875–878.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Hasslacher C, and Böhm S (2005) Diabetes and the Kidney, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.
An edited book
Bambi C (2016) Introduction to Particle Cosmology: The Standard Model of Cosmology and its Open Problems (Dolgov AD ed), Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
A chapter in an edited book
Azcue P, and Muler N (2014) Optimal Strategies, in Stochastic Optimization in Insurance: A Dynamic Programming Approach (Muler N ed) pp 97–122, Springer, New York, NY.

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 Reviews.

Blog post
Carpineti A (2016) Could The Big Bang Actually Be A Big Bounce?, IFLScience.

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 (1988) ADP Modernization: Army Plans To Improve Budget Disclosure for Its Standard Depot System, 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
Becker LA (2010) Noncredit to credit transitions: The role of cultural capital and habitus for adult immigrant learners in the community college, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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
Powell M (2017) Principles and Posturing.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lupas, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Tsou and Stearns, 2006; Lupas, 2014).

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

  • Two authors: (Tsou and Stearns, 2006)
  • Three or more authors: (Galletto et al., 2006)

About the journal

Full journal titlePharmacological Reviews
AbbreviationPharmacol. Rev.
ISSN (print)0031-6997
ISSN (online)1521-0081
ScopeMolecular Medicine
Pharmacology

Other styles