How to format your references using the The British Journal of Psychiatry citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The British Journal of Psychiatry (BJP). 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

Farmer EE. Surface-to-air signals. Nature 2001; 411: 854–6.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kramer EM, Donohue K. Evolution. Traversing the adaptive landscape in snapdragons. Science 2006; 313: 924–5.

A journal article with 3 authors

Grantab R, Shenoy VB, Ruoff RS. Anomalous strength characteristics of tilt grain boundaries in graphene. Science 2010; 330: 946–8.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Oria R, Wiegand T, Escribano J, Elosegui-Artola A, Uriarte JJ, Moreno-Pulido C, et al. Force loading explains spatial sensing of ligands by cells. Nature 2017; 552: 219–24.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Edwards J. Telecosmos. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004.

An edited book

Clack JA, Fay RR, Popper AN, editors. Evolution of the Vertebrate Ear: Evidence from the Fossil Record. Springer International Publishing, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

Hellermann G, Mohapatra S. Respiratory Syncytial Virus. In Global Virology I - Identifying and Investigating Viral Diseases (eds P Shapshak, JT Sinnott, C Somboonwit, JH Kuhn ): 73–92. Springer, 2015.

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 The British Journal of Psychiatry.

Blog post

Andrew E. Prey’s Eye View of Eagle Flight. IFLScience. 2013. (https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/prey’s-eye-view-eagle-flight/).

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. Space Science: Causes and Impacts of Cutbacks to NASA’s Outer Solar System Exploration Missions. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Onal B. RFID feasibility study for check-out stations at supermarkets. 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

Pilon M. Hands Speak Louder Than Words. New York Times. 2014; : B11.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

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	The British Journal of Psychiatry
Abbreviation	Br. J. Psychiatry
ISSN (print)	0007-1250
ISSN (online)	1472-1465
Scope	Psychiatry and Mental health