How to format your references using the British Dental Journal citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for British Dental Journal. 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

Sandrian MG. A European postdoc for the family. Science 2015; 347: 346.

A journal article with 2 authors

Saltmarsh MJ, Shapira D. Questions regarding nuclear emissions in cavitation experiments. Science 2002; 297: 1603; discussion 1603.

A journal article with 3 authors

Liljeroth P, Repp J, Meyer G. Current-induced hydrogen tautomerization and conductance switching of naphthalocyanine molecules. Science 2007; 317: 1203–1206.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Krenner W, Kühne D, Klappenberger F, Barth JV. Assessment of scanning tunneling spectroscopy modes inspecting electron confinement in surface-confined supramolecular networks. Sci Rep 2013; 3: 1454.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Kusumoto F. Understanding Intracardiac EGMs. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd: Chichester, UK, 2015.

An edited book

Landau DP, Lewis SP, Schütler H-B (eds.). Computer Simulation Studies in Condensed-Matter Physics XVI. Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006.

A chapter in an edited book

Buthelezi T. IsiZulu Language and the Ilanga Newspaper as Catalysts for Participatory Democracy in South Africa. In: Salawu A, Chibita MB (eds). Indigenous Language Media, Language Politics and Democracy in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan UK: London, 2016, pp 59–86.

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 British Dental Journal.

Blog post

Davis J. A ‘Hog Apocalypse’ Could Be Heading For Feral Pigs In Texas. IFLScience. 2017.

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. Aircraft Maintenance: Additional FAA Oversight Needed of Aging Aircraft Repairs (Vol. II). U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1991.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Sanchez-Mejia ZM. Monsoon dependent ecosystems: Implications of the vertical distribution of soil moisture on land surface-atmosphere interactions. 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

Wagner J. For the Mets, a Middleman on Call 24/7. New York Times. 2016; : D1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

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	British Dental Journal
Abbreviation	Br. Dent. J.
ISSN (print)	0007-0610
ISSN (online)	1476-5373
Scope	General Dentistry