How to format your references using the BMC Immunology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BMC Immunology. 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. Peplow M. Catalysis: The accelerator. Nature. 2013;495:S10-1.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Klitzman R, Appelbaum PS. Research ethics. To protect human subjects, review what was done, not proposed. Science. 2012;335:1576–7.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Parker HJ, Bronner ME, Krumlauf R. A Hox regulatory network of hindbrain segmentation is conserved to the base of vertebrates. Nature. 2014;514:490–3.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Nee S, Colegrave N, West SA, Grafen A. The illusion of invariant quantities in life histories. Science. 2005;309:1236–9.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Bragg SM. The Controller’s Function. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2011.

An edited book

1. García-Cintado A. Spanish Regional Unemployment: Disentangling the Sources of Hysteresis. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Corrigan TD. The Current State of Financial Education in the US: How is Higher Education Helping? In: Lamdin DJ, editor. Consumer Knowledge and Financial Decisions: Lifespan Perspectives. New York, NY: Springer; 2012. p. 67–75.

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 Immunology.

Blog post

1. O`Callaghan J. Watch Live As ESA Attempts To Land On Mars. IFLScience. 2016. 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. Higher Education: Students Have Increased Borrowing and Working to Help Pay Higher Tuitions. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1998.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Lizarraga D. Effects of large inedible particles on the feeding performance of echinodem larvae. 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. Kelly C. Antiques Dealers Still Scoring Big Sales. New York Times. 2009;:B6.

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 Immunology
Abbreviation	BMC Immunol.
ISSN (online)	1471-2172
Scope	Immunology