How to format your references using the Perspectives on Medical Education citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Perspectives on 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	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

1. Camba R. Start making sense. Nature. 2000;406:461.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Livio M, Rees MJ. Cosmology. Anthropic reasoning. Science. 2005;309:1022–3.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Neale MJ, Pan J, Keeney S. Endonucleolytic processing of covalent protein-linked DNA double-strand breaks. Nature. 2005;436:1053–7.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Weidner CI, Walenda T, Lin Q, Wölfler MM, Denecke B, Costa IG, et al. Hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells acquire distinct DNA-hypermethylation during in vitro culture. Sci Rep. 2013;3:3372.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Abraham A. The Trend Following Bible. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2012.

An edited book

1. Al-Khayri JM, Jain SM, Johnson DV, editors. Date Palm Genetic Resources and Utilization: Volume 1: Africa and the Americas. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands; 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Horsthemke B. Epimutations in Human Disease. In: Doerfler W, Böhm P, editors. DNA Methylation: Development, Genetic Disease and Cancer. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2006. p. 45–59.

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 Perspectives on Medical Education.

Blog post

1. Luntz S. Life in Deep Ocean Trench Not As Expected. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2014.

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. Inspectors General: Information on Resources and Selected Accomplishments of 18 Inspectors General. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2000 Apr. Report No.: AIMD-00-149R.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Cooper T. Biting Animals [Doctoral dissertation]. [Long Beach, CA]: California State University, Long Beach; 2009.

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. Rothenberg B. Federer Beats Wawrinka, and His Own Aging Body, to Reach Final. New York Times. 2017 Jan 26;B9.

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	Perspectives on Medical Education
Abbreviation	Perspect. Med. Educ.
ISSN (print)	2212-2761
ISSN (online)	2212-277X
Scope