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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Merryfield, B.: Ocean science. Ocean mixing in 10 steps. Science. 308, 641–642 (2005)

A journal article with 2 authors

Hug, C., Lodish, H.F.: Medicine. Visfatin: a new adipokine. Science. 307, 366–367 (2005)

A journal article with 3 authors

Mihalcescu, I., Hsing, W., Leibler, S.: Resilient circadian oscillator revealed in individual cyanobacteria. Nature. 430, 81–85 (2004)

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Chiu, A.S., Gehringer, M.M., Braidy, N., Guillemin, G.J., Welch, J.H., Neilan, B.A.: Gliotoxicity of the cyanotoxin, β-methyl-amino-L-alanine (BMAA). Sci. Rep. 3, 1482 (2013)

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Maillard, P.: Competitive Quality Strategies. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ USA (2013)

An edited book

Baawain, M., Choudri, B.S., Ahmed, M., Purnama, A. eds: Recent Progress in Desalination, Environmental and Marine Outfall Systems. Springer International Publishing, Cham (2015)

A chapter in an edited book

del Pilar Agustín Llach, M., Fontecha, A.F.: Lexical Variation in Learners’ Responses to Cue Words: The Effect of Gender. In: Jiménez Catalán, R.M. (ed.) Lexical Availability in English and Spanish as a Second Language. pp. 69–81. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht (2014)

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

Andrew, E.: Celebrate 50 Years Of Humans Walking In Space With NASA, https://www.iflscience.com/space/celebrate-50-years-humans-walking-space-nasa/

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: Emergency Alerting: Capabilities Have Improved, but Additional Guidance and Testing Are Needed. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (2013)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Ball-Miles, N.M.: The relationship between witnessing verbal marital conflict as a child and the behavioral anger responses in adulthood, (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

Feeney, K.: That General-Store Feeling, (2010)

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