How to format your references using the BMC Oral Health citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BMC Oral Health. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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. Grinnell F. It is time to update US biomedical funding. Nature. 2013;501:137.
A journal article with 2 authors
1. Patel MR, Shen K. RSY-1 is a local inhibitor of presynaptic assembly in C. elegans. Science. 2009;323:1500–3.
A journal article with 3 authors
1. Zhao W, Luo J, Jiao S. Comprehensive characterization of cancer subtype associated long non-coding RNAs and their clinical implications. Sci Rep. 2014;4:6591.
A journal article with 7 or more authors
1. Chen P, Tao L, Wang T, Zhang J, He A, Lam K-H, et al. Structural basis for recognition of frizzled proteins by Clostridium difficile toxin B. Science. 2018;360:664–9.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
1. Bakus GJ. Quantitative Analysis of Marine Biological Communities. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2007.
An edited book
1. Silhavy R, Senkerik R, Oplatkova ZK, Silhavy P, Prokopova Z, editors. Artificial Intelligence Perspectives in Intelligent Systems: Proceedings of the 5th Computer Science On-line Conference 2016 (CSOC2016), Vol 1. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2016.
A chapter in an edited book
1. Maricau E, Gielen G. Analog IC Reliability Simulation. In: Gielen G, editor. Analog IC Reliability in Nanometer CMOS. New York, NY: Springer; 2013. p. 93–149.

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 Oral Health.

Blog post
1. Andrew E. How Nanotechnology Can Help Us Grow More Food Using Less Energy And Water. 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. Federal Communications Commission: Implementation of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1999.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
1. Serrano M. Bilingual Sentiment Analysis of Spanglish Tweets. Doctoral dissertation. Florida Atlantic 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. Walsh MW. Calstrs Eyes a Strategy to Cut Risk. New York Times. 2015;: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 titleBMC Oral Health
AbbreviationBMC Oral Health
ISSN (online)1472-6831
ScopeGeneral Dentistry

Other styles