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. Strober W. Immunology. Unraveling gut inflammation. Science. 2006;313:1052–4.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Lau W, Sattely ES. Six enzymes from mayapple that complete the biosynthetic pathway to the etoposide aglycone. Science. 2015;349:1224–8.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Scholl JA, Koh AL, Dionne JA. Quantum plasmon resonances of individual metallic nanoparticles. Nature. 2012;483:421–7.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Kim CH, Oda T, Itoh M, Jiang D, Artinger KB, Chandrasekharappa SC, et al. Repressor activity of Headless/Tcf3 is essential for vertebrate head formation. Nature. 2000;407:913–6.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Billington DP. Der Turm und die Brücke. D-69451 Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH; 2013.

An edited book

1. Odenbach S, editor. Colloidal Magnetic Fluids: Basics, Development and Application of Ferrofluids. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2009.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Flint KJ, Needham D. ‘Framing’ Lifelong Learning in the Twenty-First Century: Towards a Way of Thinking. In: Aspin DN, editor. Philosophical Perspectives on Lifelong Learning. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands; 2007. p. 85–105.

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. Hamilton K. We Have A Vaccine For Six Cancers; Why Are Less Than Half Of Kids Getting It? IFLScience. 2017. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/we-have-a-vaccine-for-six-cancers-why-are-less-than-half-of-kids-getting-it/. 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. Space Station: Impact of the Grounding of the Shuttle Fleet. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2003.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Casaburi JD. Wildfire-traversal of network address translation routers to provide end-to-end connectivity to firewalled hosts. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach; 2010.

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. Wagner J. Baseball Could Wait Until School Was Done. New York Times. 2017;:B8.

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