How to format your references using the North Carolina Medical Journal citation style

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

Pääbo S. The mosaic that is our genome. Nature. 2003;421(6921):409-412.

A journal article with 2 authors

Boss PK, Thomas MR. Association of dwarfism and floral induction with a grape “green revolution” mutation. Nature. 2002;416(6883):847-850.

A journal article with 3 authors

Preusser F, Radies D, Matter A. A 160,000-year record of dune development and atmospheric circulation in Southern Arabia. Science. 2002;296(5575):2018-2020.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Kranendijk M, Struys EA, van Schaftingen E, et al. IDH2 mutations in patients with D-2-hydroxyglutaric aciduria. Science. 2010;330(6002):336.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Donald H, Robert D. G. Longitudinal Data Analysis: Hedeker/Longitudinal. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2006.

An edited book

Santamaría L. Neuroendocrine Cells and Peptidergic Innervation in Human and Rat Prostate. Vol 194. (Alonso L, Ingelmo I, Pozuelo JM, Rodriguez R, eds.). Springer; 2007.

A chapter in an edited book

Hayashi Y, Ikeda M. Knowledge Level Design Support for Adaptive Learning Contents: Ontological Consideration of Knowledge Level Structure of SCORM2004 Contents. In: Washio T, Sakurai A, Nakajima K, Takeda H, Tojo S, Yokoo M, eds. New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence: Joint JSAI 2005 Workshop Post-Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer; 2006:41-52.

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 North Carolina Medical Journal.

Blog post

Andrew E. Demand For Agricultural Goods Drives Shocking Rates Of Illegal Deforestation. IFLScience.

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. Railroad Regulation: Changes in Freight Railroad Rates from 1997 through 2000. U.S. Government Printing Office; 2002.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Horton CR. Financial Crisis within the Nonprofit Sector. Doctoral dissertation. Capella University; 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

Neuman W. In Colombia, Two Warring Officials Provide a Portrait of a Nation’s Political Divide. New York Times. March 16, 2014:A6.

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	North Carolina Medical Journal
Abbreviation	N. C. Med. J.
ISSN (print)	0029-2559
Scope	General Medicine

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