How to format your references using the Medical Education citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Medical Education. 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

Baker J. The falcon has landed. Introduction to special issue. Science. 2006 Jun 2;312(5778):1327.

A journal article with 2 authors

Ahn S, Joyner AL. In vivo analysis of quiescent adult neural stem cells responding to Sonic hedgehog. Nature. 2005 Oct 6;437(7060):894–7.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bánsági T Jr, Vanag VK, Epstein IR. Tomography of reaction-diffusion microemulsions reveals three-dimensional Turing patterns. Science. 2011 Mar 11;331(6022):1309–12.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Pereira JP, Kelly LM, Xu Y, Cyster JG. EBI2 mediates B cell segregation between the outer and centre follicle. Nature. 2009 Aug 27;460(7259):1122–6.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Li FM, Nathan A, Wu Y, Ong BS. Organic Thin Film Transistor Integration. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA; 2011.

An edited book

Takamura S, editor. Splitting Deformations of Degenerations of Complex Curves: Towards the Classification of Atoms of Degenerations, III. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2006. XII, 594 p. 123 illus. (Lecture Notes in Mathematics; vol. 1886).

A chapter in an edited book

Teoh HJ, Chen TL, Cheng CH. Frequency-Weighted Fuzzy Time-Series Based on Fibonacci Sequence for TAIEX Forecasting. In: Washio T, Zhou ZH, Huang JZ, Hu X, Li J, Xie C, et al., editors. Emerging Technologies in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: PAKDD 2007 International Workshops Nanjing, China, May 22-25, 2007 Revised Selected Papers. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2007. p. 27–34. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science).

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 Medical Education.

Blog post

Andrew E. Fish Can Make Their Own Sunscreen. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2015.

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. Highway Safety: Monitoring Practices To Show Compliance With Speed Limits Should Be Reexamined. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1988 Mar. Report No.: RCED-88-93BR.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Bombard B. Literature circles book club for science and language arts [Doctoral dissertation]. [Long Beach, CA]: California State University, Long Beach; 2012.

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

Shultz GP, Halstead T. Paris Deal Benefits Business. New York Times. 2017 May 9;A23.

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	Medical Education
Abbreviation	Med. Educ.
ISSN (print)	0308-0110
ISSN (online)	1365-2923
Scope	General Medicine Education

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