How to format your references using the Indian Journal of Medical Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Indian Journal of Medical Sciences. 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

Snyder SH. Neuroscience. Adam finds an exciting mate. Science 2006;313(5794):1744–5.

A journal article with 2 authors

Rogulja D, Young MW. Control of sleep by cyclin A and its regulator. Science 2012;335(6076):1617–21.

A journal article with 3 authors

Hopkins M, Harrison TM, Manning CE. Low heat flow inferred from >4 Gyr zircons suggests Hadean plate boundary interactions. Nature 2008;456(7221):493–6.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Wilde SA, Valley JW, Peck WH, Graham CM. Evidence from detrital zircons for the existence of continental crust and oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr ago. Nature 2001;409(6817):175–8.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Van Fleet PJ. Discrete Wavelet Transformations. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2008.

An edited book

Maneth S, editor. Data Science: 30th British International Conference on Databases, BICOD 2015, Edinburgh, UK, July 6-8, 2015, Proceedings. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

Fang AC, Cao J. Etymological Features Across Genres and Registers. In: Cao J, editor. Text Genres and Registers: The Computation of Linguistic Features. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2015. page 55–70.

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 Indian Journal of Medical Sciences.

Blog post

Luntz S. Smart Female Guppies With Bigger Brains Choose More Attractive Mates. IFLScience2017;

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. Aviation Safety: Status of Recommendations to Improve FAA’s Certification and Approval Processes. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2013.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Dickinson S. Best practices in integrating acquisitions. 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

Pilon M. Off Without a Hitch. New York Times2013;F1.

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	Indian Journal of Medical Sciences
Abbreviation	Indian J. Med. Sci.
ISSN (print)	0019-5359
ISSN (online)	1998-3654
Scope	General Medicine

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