How to format your references using the National Medical Journal of China citation style

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

Gibbons A. GENOMICS: Building a Case for Sequencing the Chimp. Science. 2000 Aug 25;289(5483):1267a.

A journal article with 2 authors

Sherman G, Visscher PK. Honeybee colonies achieve fitness through dancing. Nature. 2002 Oct 31;419(6910):920–2.

A journal article with 3 authors

van Polanen V, Bergmann Tiest WM, Kappers AML. Target contact and exploration strategies in haptic search. Sci Rep. 2014 Sep 3;4:6254.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Oliver WD, Yu Y, Lee JC, Berggren KK, Levitov LS, Orlando TP. Mach-Zehnder interferometry in a strongly driven superconducting qubit. Science. 2005 Dec 9;310(5754):1653–7.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Held G. Bulletproofing TCP/IP-based Windows NT/2000 Networks. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2001.

An edited book

Medina LS, Applegate KE, Blackmore CC, editors. Evidence-Based Imaging in Pediatrics: Optimizing Imaging in Pediatric Patient Care. New York, NY: Springer; 2010. XXII, 666 p.

A chapter in an edited book

Nayak M, Agrawal S, Srinathan K. Minimal Connectivity for Unconditionally Secure Message Transmission in Synchronous Directed Networks. In: Fehr S, editor. Information Theoretic Security: 5th International Conference, ICITS 2011, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 21-24, 2011 Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2011. p. 32–51. (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 National Medical Journal of China.

Blog post

Carpineti A. This Distant Galaxy Is A Star-Forming Champion [Internet]. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2016 [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/space/this-distant-galaxy-is-a-starforming-champion/

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. Assessment of the Impact Aid Program. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1976 Oct. Report No.: B-164031(1).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Schoenecker KD. Determinants of life satisfaction: Generated and ranked by undergraduate college students [Doctoral dissertation]. [Bloomington, IN]: Indiana University; 2010.

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

Pérez-Peña R, Schmidt MS. Woman Is Beheaded in Attack at Oklahoma Food Plant. New York Times. 2014 Sep 27;A12.

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	National Medical Journal of China
ISSN (print)	0376-2491
Scope