How to format your references using the British Journal of Cancer citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for British Journal of Cancer (BJC). 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

Petherick A (2012) Environment and genetics: Making sense of the noise. Nature 485: S64-5.

A journal article with 2 authors

Zhu M, Yu X (2002) A primitive fish close to the common ancestor of tetrapods and lungfish. Nature 418: 767–770.

A journal article with 3 authors

Post DM, Pace ML, Hairston NG Jr (2000) Ecosystem size determines food-chain length in lakes. Nature 405: 1047–1049.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Thomas JA, Telfer MG, Roy DB, Preston CD, Greenwood JJD, Asher J, Fox R, Clarke RT, Lawton JH (2004) Comparative losses of British butterflies, birds, and plants and the global extinction crisis. Science 303: 1879–1881.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Zhang B, Qiu D (2014) Sneak Circuits of Power Electronic Converters (Singapore: John Wiley & Sons Singapore Pte. Ltd).

An edited book

Pokorski M (2016) Respirology (Cham: Springer International Publishing).

A chapter in an edited book

Dolev S, Garay J, Gilboa N, Kolesnikov V, Yuditsky Y (2013) Towards Efficient Private Distributed Computation on Unbounded Input Streams. In Applied Cryptography and Network Security: 11th International Conference, ACNS 2013, Banff, AB, Canada, June 25-28, 2013. Proceedings, M. Jacobson, M. Locasto, P. Mohassel, and R. Safavi-Naini, eds. (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), pp. 69–83.

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 Journal of Cancer.

Blog post

Taub B (2016) Mutilated Child Skeletons Hint At Human Sacrifice In Pre-Columbian Peru (IFLScience) https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/mutilated-child-skeletons-hint-human-sacrifice-pre-columbian-peru/ (accessed: 30/10/2018).

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 (1997) District of Columbia Public Schools: School Year 1996-97 Enrollment Count Vulnerable to Errors (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Santos E (2019) Altruism in Psychotherapy: Altruistic Acts as an Adjunct to Psychotherapy. Doctoral dissertation. Pepperdine University.

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

Berkon B (2016) Jewish Player’s Card From 1914 Provokes a $125,000 Dispute. New York Times D5.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Petherick, 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Zhu & Yu, 2002; Petherick, 2012).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Zhu & Yu, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Thomas et al, 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	British Journal of Cancer
Abbreviation	Br. J. Cancer
ISSN (print)	0007-0920
ISSN (online)	1532-1827
Scope	Cancer Research Oncology