How to format your references using the BMJ Quality Improvement Reports citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BMJ Quality Improvement Reports. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Venema L. Fathers of electronic revolution are rewarded. Nature. 2000;407:662.

A journal article with 2 authors

Liberles SD, Buck LB. A second class of chemosensory receptors in the olfactory epithelium. Nature. 2006;442:645–50.

A journal article with 3 authors

Gillespie AR, Montgomery DR, Mushkin A. Planetary science: are there active glaciers on Mars? Nature. 2005;438:E9-10; discussion E10.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Kawakami R, Shinohara Y, Kato Y, et al. Asymmetrical allocation of NMDA receptor epsilon2 subunits in hippocampal circuitry. Science. 2003;300:990–4.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Johnson JL. Probability and Statistics for Computer Science. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1997.

An edited book

DeMello WC, Frohlich ED, editors. Renin Angiotensin System and Cardiovascular Disease. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press 2010.

A chapter in an edited book

Howard AM, Remy S, Hyuk Park C, et al. Intelligent Robotics for Assistive Healthcare and Therapy. In: Sukhatme G, ed. The Path to Autonomous Robots: Essays in Honor of George A. Bekey. Boston, MA: Springer US 2009:1–17.

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 BMJ Quality Improvement Reports.

Blog post

Andrew E. Researchers Produce The First Synthetic Gasoline From Plants. IFLScience. 2015. https://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/researchers-produce-first-synthetic-plant-gasoline/ (accessed 30 October 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

Government Accountability Office. Social Security Numbers: SSNs Are Widely Used by Government and Could Be Better Protected. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office 2002.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Aiken J. Virtually a leader: Mitigating process losses through shared team states. 2009.

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

Cooper M. Philip Gossett, Scholar, 75; Revived Lost Opera Scores. New York Times. 2017;B14.

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	BMJ Quality Improvement Reports
Abbreviation	BMJ Qual. Improv. Rep.
ISSN (online)	2050-1315
Scope