How to format your references using the Irish Journal of Medical Science citation style

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

Check E (2007) Patenting the obvious? Nature 447:16–17

A journal article with 2 authors

Fitter AH, Fitter RSR (2002) Rapid changes in flowering time in British plants. Science 296:1689–1691

A journal article with 3 authors

Auerbach BD, Osterweil EK, Bear MF (2011) Mutations causing syndromic autism define an axis of synaptic pathophysiology. Nature 480:63–68

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Hanayama R, Tanaka M, Miwa K, et al (2002) Identification of a factor that links apoptotic cells to phagocytes. Nature 417:182–187

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Barbosa P, Berry DL, Kary CS (2014) Insect Histology. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Vincent J-L (2016) Annual Update in Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine 2016, 1st ed. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Ramsay JO, Hooker G, Graves S (2009) Smoothing: Computing Curves from Noisy Data. In: Hooker G, Graves S (eds) Functional Data Analysis with R and MATLAB. Springer, New York, NY, pp 59–82

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 Irish Journal of Medical Science.

Blog post

Davis J (2015) Scientists Predict Everest Could Be Ice-Free By The End Of This Century. In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (2013) 911 Services: Most States Used 911 Funds for Intended Purposes, but FCC Could Improve Its Reporting on States’ Use of Funds. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Moreno S (2009) Mother-child relationships: Females behind bars and their children. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

Duerden J (2017) Qatar’s World Cup Résumé: Zero Games; 2022 Host. New York Times SP3

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	Irish Journal of Medical Science
Abbreviation	Ir. J. Med. Sci.
ISSN (print)	0021-1265
ISSN (online)	1863-4362
Scope	General Medicine