How to format your references using the BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. 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. Brown JR. Climate science: El Niño’s variable history. Nature. 2014;515:494–5.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Goring DR, Walker JC. Plant sciences. Self-rejection--a new kinase connection. Science. 2004;303:1474–5.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Finn CA, Sisson TW, Deszcz-Pan M. Aerogeophysical measurements of collapse-prone hydrothermally altered zones at Mount Rainier volcano. Nature. 2001;409:600–3.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Keck JM, Jones MH, Wong CCL, Binkley J, Chen D, Jaspersen SL, et al. A cell cycle phosphoproteome of the yeast centrosome. Science. 2011;332:1557–61.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Canham J, Bennett J. Mentorship in Community Nursing: Challenges and Opportunities. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Science Ltd; 2008.

An edited book

1. Zhang T-C, Ouyang P, Kaplan S, Skarnes B, editors. Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Applied Biotechnology (ICAB 2012): Volume 3. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Alahmari S. Overcoming Cultural Barriers. In: Hartlep ND, Hensley BO, editors. Critical Storytelling in Uncritical Times: Stories Disclosed in a Cultural Foundations of Education Course. Rotterdam: SensePublishers; 2015. p. 37–41.

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 Informatics and Decision Making.

Blog post

1. Andrew E. How Computers are Learning to Make Human Software Work More Efficiently. IFLScience. 2015. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/how-computers-are-learning-make-human-software-work-more-efficiently/. 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. NASA’s Customer Satisfaction Measurements. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1997.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Wicks CF. The Self-Concept of Students in Remediation in a Rural Community College in Mississippi. Doctoral dissertation. Mississippi State University; 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. Sánchez Y. Goliath Opens His Wallet. New York Times. 2014;:A35.

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 Informatics and Decision Making
Abbreviation	BMC Med. Inform. Decis. Mak.
ISSN (online)	1472-6947
Scope	Health Informatics Health Policy