How to format your references using the BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth. 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. Kohane IS. HEALTH CARE POLICY. Ten things we have to do to achieve precision medicine. Science. 2015;349:37–8.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Nijman SMB, Friend SH. Cancer. Potential of the synthetic lethality principle. Science. 2013;342:809–11.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Baron-Cohen S, Knickmeyer RC, Belmonte MK. Sex differences in the brain: implications for explaining autism. Science. 2005;310:819–23.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Litingtung Y, Dahn RD, Li Y, Fallon JF, Chiang C. Shh and Gli3 are dispensable for limb skeleton formation but regulate digit number and identity. Nature. 2002;418:979–83.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Stidwill D, Fletcher R. Normal Binocular Vision. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.; 2010.

An edited book

1. Kim SS, editor. Oocyte Biology in Fertility Preservation. New York, NY: Springer; 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Lima FHB, Cantane DA. Recent Advances on Nanostructured Electrocatalysts for Oxygen Electro-Reduction and Ethanol Electro-Oxidation. In: de Souza FL, Leite ER, editors. Nanoenergy: Nanotechnology Applied for Energy Production. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2013. p. 125–51.

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 Pregnancy and Childbirth.

Blog post

1. Andrew E. What Mongol History Predicts For The New Season Of Game of Thrones. 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. Review of HEW Guidelines for Acquiring Automatic Data Processing Systems Under the Social Security Act. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1979.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Winchester CL. Alleghanian plutonism in the eastern Blue Ridge province of the southern Appalachians: Origin and tectonic setting. Doctoral dissertation. University of North Carolina; 2013.

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. Crow K. They Say the Town Cars Are Three Wide on Broadway. New York Times. 2002;:147.

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 Pregnancy and Childbirth
Abbreviation	BMC Pregnancy Childbirth
ISSN (online)	1471-2393
Scope	Obstetrics and Gynaecology