How to format your references using the International Journal of Medical Informatics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for International Journal of Medical Informatics. 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]

B. Engelhardt, Neuroscience. Blood-brain barrier differentiation, Science 334 (2011) 1652–1653.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

J. Delbarco-Trillo, M.H. Ferkin, Male mammals respond to a risk of sperm competition conveyed by odours of conspecific males, Nature 431 (2004) 446–449.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

D. Su, S. Dou, G. Wang, Single crystalline Co3O4 nanocrystals exposed with different crystal planes for Li-O2 batteries, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 5767.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

S.J. Wang, M.L. Sui, Y.T. Chen, Q.H. Lu, E. Ma, X.Y. Pei, Q.Z. Li, H.B. Hu, Microstructural fingerprints of phase transitions in shock-loaded iron, Sci. Rep. 3 (2013) 1086.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

M.A.R. Habib, Literary Criticism from Plato to the Present, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 2010.

An edited book

[1]

E.E. Gdoutos, ed., Experimental Analysis of Nano and Engineering Materials and Structures: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Experimental Mechanics, Alexandroupolis, Greece, July 1–6, 2007, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2007.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

T. Barkowsky, Modeling Mental Spatial Knowledge Processing, in: F. Mast, L. Jäncke (Eds.), Spatial Processing in Navigation, Imagery and Perception, Springer US, Boston, MA, 2007: pp. 67–84.

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 International Journal of Medical Informatics.

Blog post

[1]

B. Taub, Excessive Drinking Could Increase Your Chance Of Asthma, IFLScience (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/excessive-drinking-could-increase-your-chances-asthma/ (accessed October 30, 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, Uses of Minicomputers in the Federal Government: Trends, Benefits, and Problems, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1976.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

M.C. Ashbran, Examining student learning in a physics pedagogical content knowledge course, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2011.

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]

S.M. Novick, Farm to Blanket, New York Times (2015) LI8.

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	International Journal of Medical Informatics
Abbreviation	Int. J. Med. Inform.
ISSN (print)	1386-5056
Scope	Health Informatics