How to format your references using the BMC Medical Education citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BMC Medical Education. 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. Pain E. Science careers. Playing well with industry. Science. 2008;319:1548–51.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Freeman MR, Choi BC. Advances in magnetic microscopy. Science. 2001;294:1484–8.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Schummers J, Yu H, Sur M. Tuned responses of astrocytes and their influence on hemodynamic signals in the visual cortex. Science. 2008;320:1638–43.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Kłos JW, Kumar D, Krawczyk M, Barman A. Magnonic band engineering by intrinsic and extrinsic mirror symmetry breaking in antidot spin-wave waveguides. Sci Rep. 2013;3:2444.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Giannini F, Leuzzi G. Nonlinear Microwave Circuit Design. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2005.

An edited book

1. Grab S, Knight J, editors. Landscapes and Landforms of South Africa. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Cochez M, Terziyan V, Ermolayev V. Balanced Large Scale Knowledge Matching Using LSH Forest. In: Cardoso J, Guerra F, Houben G-J, Pinto AM, Velegrakis Y, editors. Semantic Keyword-based Search on Structured Data Sources: First COST Action IC1302 International KEYSTONE Conference, IKC 2015, Coimbra, Portugal, September 8-9, 2015. Revised Selected Papers. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015. p. 36–50.

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 Medical Education.

Blog post

1. Andrews R. Nestlé’s New Sugar Type Means 40% Less Will Be Used In Its Chocolate. IFLScience. 2016. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/nestle-new-sugar-type-40-less-used-chocolate/. 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. Procedures To Recover Defaulted Loans Under the Guaranteed Student Loan Program. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1973.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Mueck K. Physiology of the Invasive Apple Snail, Pomacea maculata (Perry, 1810), in Louisiana. Doctoral dissertation. University of Louisiana; 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. (nyt) SK. World Briefing | Europe: Russia: U.S. Asylum For Blast Survivor. New York Times. 2005;:A6.

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 Medical Education
Abbreviation	BMC Med. Educ.
ISSN (online)	1472-6920
Scope	General Medicine Education