How to format your references using the The Central African Journal of Medicine citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The Central African Journal of Medicine. 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

Hartung T. Toxicology for the twenty-first century. Nature. 2009 Jul 9;460(7252):208–12.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gilg O, Yoccoz NG. Ecology. Explaining bird migration. Science. 2010 Jan 15;327(5963):276–7.

A journal article with 3 authors

Chen LM, Friedman RM, Roe AW. Optical imaging of a tactile illusion in area 3b of the primary somatosensory cortex. Science. 2003 Oct 31;302(5646):881–5.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Doshi R, Chen BR, Vibat CRT, Huang N, Lee CW, Chang G. In vitro nanobody discovery for integral membrane protein targets. Sci Rep. 2014 Oct 24;4:6760.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Woolf G. Tales of the Barbarians. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell; 2011.

An edited book

Sommaruga G, editor. Formal Theories of Information: From Shannon to Semantic Information Theory and General Concepts of Information. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2009. VII, 269 p. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; vol. 5363).

A chapter in an edited book

Keshtkar F, Burkett C, Li H, Graesser AC. Using Data Mining Techniques to Detect the Personality of Players in an Educational Game. In: Peña-Ayala A, editor. Educational Data Mining: Applications and Trends. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2014. p. 125–50. (Studies in Computational Intelligence).

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 The Central African Journal of Medicine.

Blog post

Andrew E. New Baby Dinosaur Fossil Reveals Cause of Death. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2013.

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. Embedded Computer Systems: Significant Software Problems on C-17 Must Be Addressed. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1992 May. Report No.: IMTEC-92-48.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Zhang Y. A Grant Proposal for Mindfulness-Based Self-Care Training for Child Welfare Workers [Doctoral dissertation]. [Long Beach, CA]: California State University, Long Beach; 2017.

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

Baum S, Conklin K, Johnson N. Stop Penalizing Poor College Students. New York Times. 2013 Nov 13;A31.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses:

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	The Central African Journal of Medicine
Abbreviation	Cent. Afr. J. Med.
ISSN (print)	0008-9176
Scope	General Medicine

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