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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BMC Medical Physics. 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. Raizen MG. Comprehensive control of atomic motion. Science. 2009;324:1403–6.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Hong S, Asai T. Effect of panel shape of soccer ball on its flight characteristics. Sci Rep. 2014;4:5068.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Coulthard G, Erb W, Aggarwal VK. Stereocontrolled organocatalytic synthesis of prostaglandin PGF2α in seven steps. Nature. 2012;489:278–81.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Johánek V, Laurin M, Grant AW, Kasemo B, Henry CR, Libuda J. Fluctuations and bistabilities on catalyst nanoparticles. Science. 2004;304:1639–44.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Shanmugam R, Chattamvelli R. Statistics for Scientists and Engineers. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc; 2015.

An edited book

1. Moor O de, Gottlob G, Furche T, Sellers A, editors. Datalog Reloaded: First International Workshop, Datalog 2010, Oxford, UK, March 16-19, 2010. Revised Selected Papers. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Loog M. Semi-supervised Linear Discriminant Analysis Using Moment Constraints. In: Schwenker F, Trentin E, editors. Partially Supervised Learning: First IAPR TC3 Workshop, PSL 2011, Ulm, Germany, September 15-16, 2011, Revised Selected Papers. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2012. p. 32–41.

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 Physics.

Blog post

1. Andrew E. One Night Of Sleep Deprivation Can Affect The Genes That Control The Biological Clocks In Your Cells. IFLScience. 2015. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/one-night-sleep-deprivation-can-affect-genes-control-biological-clocks-your/. 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 Acquisitions: Some Programs Have Overcome Past Problems, but Challenges and Uncertainty Remain for the Future. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2015.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Gordon RL. Neural and behavioral correlates of song prosody. Doctoral dissertation. Florida Atlantic University; 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. Bray C, de la MERCED MJ. QVC and Home Shopping Network to Join Forces in $2.1 Billion Merger. New York Times. 2017;:B4.

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 Physics
ISSN (print)	1756-6649
Scope

Research and Writing Guides