How to format your references using the BMC Dermatology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BMC Dermatology. 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. Poitrasson F. Geochemistry. Probes of the ancient and the inaccessible. Science. 2009;323:882–3.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Tsubouchi T, Roeder GS. A synaptonemal complex protein promotes homology-independent centromere coupling. Science. 2005;308:870–3.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Werner SC, Ody A, Poulet F. The source crater of martian shergottite meteorites. Science. 2014;343:1343–6.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Cho H, Hashimoto T, Wong E, Hori Y, Wood LB, Zhao L, et al. Microfluidic chemotaxis platform for differentiating the roles of soluble and bound amyloid-β on microglial accumulation. Sci Rep. 2013;3:1823.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Al-Shuhail AA, Al-Dossary SA, Mousa WA. Seismic Data Interpretation using Digital Image Processing. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2017.

An edited book

1. Peris-Ortiz M, Merigó-Lindahl JM, editors. Entrepreneurship, Regional Development and Culture: An Institutional Perspective. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Neuer M, Mosch C, Salk J, Siegmund K, Kushnarenko V, Kombrink S, et al. Storage Systems for I/O-Intensive Applications in Computational Chemistry. In: Resch MM, Bez W, Focht E, Kobayashi H, Qi J, Roller S, editors. Sustained Simulation Performance 2015: Proceedings of the joint Workshop on Sustained Simulation Performance, University of Stuttgart (HLRS) and Tohoku University, 2015. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015. p. 51–60.

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 BMC Dermatology.

Blog post

1. Andrew E. Divers Stumble Upon Bizarre, Car-Sized Ball Of Jelly. IFLScience. 2015. Accessed 30 Oct 2018.

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. Long-Range Planning Can Improve the Efficiency of Agricultural Research and Development. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1981.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Marquez HH. Social Capital, Academics, and Sense of Belonging among High School Foster Youth. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach; 2017.

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. Dailey M. The Arts Fall Preview Is About to Drop. New York Times. 2017;:A2.

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	BMC Dermatology
Abbreviation	BMC Dermatol.
ISSN (online)	1471-5945
Scope	Dermatology