References

Body copy

If authors of a given study are mentioned in the sentence, the reference should be placed at the end of the clause or sentence (before the full stop) and not directly after the study author’s name.

Calvin et al. conducted a study comparing intelligence test scores from 11-year-old girls and boys born in Scotland in 1936, with cause of death¹.

Boxes/tables/figures

References should not be provided in any form of subhead or title. Instead, they should be provided at the end of the table/figure as a source, providing only the name of the source (journal or website) of the reference and its corresponding reference list number:

Note: references appearing for the first time in boxes/tables/figures should cited first in the body copy, where it says ‘see Box/Figure/Table’

Journal abbreviations

Journal names should be italicised and abbreviated in references but spelled out in full in body text. Abbreviations follow those used on PubMed (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/journals). There should be no full stops after any of the abbreviated title. 

The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,
should be cited as Proc Natl Acad Sci, not PNAS 

While journal names can be abbreviated in references, organisations, such as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, must be spelled out in full in each reference. Similarly, if a journal has an acronym that it prefers, but that acronym is not listed on PubMed, the acronym should not be included.

DOIs and URLs

Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs, are unique codes given to specific objects online. Some articles do not have DOIs; this is often owing to age, although some publications simply do not use them. If an article being referenced does not have a DOI, please add the PubMed ID (known as a ‘PMID’) instead and hyperlink it to the the version accessible on PubMed. 

NICE guidance

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is a useful repository of national guidelines. It is also heavily referenced by journals and magazines across the sector. Our style is to use the full name of the guidance, followed by the identifier that NICE uses, separated by a full stop. Do not use the abbreviation NICE as part of the author name: 

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Antimicrobial stewardship: systems and processes for effective antimicrobial medicine use.
NICE guideline [NG15]. 2015. Available at: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng15 (accessed June 2018)

Images

Both in print and online, images should be attributed to whoever took the photo/created the illustration. If they are an employee of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, this should be noted after their name, seperated by a forward-slash. If they work on The Pharmaceutical Journal, this should be noted instead. 

If the image has come from an image library or someone someone outside the RPS, please use the following rules instead:

Shutterstock — all images should be attributed to Shutterstock.com;

Alamy — each image should be attributed to the citation given for that specific picture. This is usually something to the effect of Alamy / XXX

Science Photo Library — each image should be attributed to the citation given for that specific picture. This is usually something to the effect of Science Photo Library / XXX;

External photographer — use the citation given; if they have not given a specific citation, cite their name

Author images — cite the insititutional body who supplied the image (if applicable). If no citation is given, cite the image as “Courtesy of XXX”, where XXX is their name.