How to format your references using the World Medical Journal citation style

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

Grabowsky M. The billion-dollar malaria moment. Nature. 2008 Feb 28;451(7182):1051–2.

A journal article with 2 authors

Burdett TC, Freeman MR. Neuroscience. Astrocytes eyeball axonal mitochondria. Science. 2014 Jul 25;345(6195):385–6.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kirchner JW, Feng X, Neal C. Fractal stream chemistry and its implications for contaminant transport in catchments. Nature. 2000 Feb 3;403(6769):524–7.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Mirebeau I, Goncharenko IN, Cadavez-Peres P, Bramwell ST, Gingras MJP, Gardner JS. Pressure-induced crystallization of a spin liquid. Nature. 2002 Nov 7;420(6911):54–7.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Daïan JF. Equilibrium and Transfer in Porous Media 1. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2014.

An edited book

Bimbó K, editor. J. Michael Dunn on Information Based Logics. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2016. XLIII, 436 p. 21 illus. (Outstanding Contributions to Logic; vol. 8).

A chapter in an edited book

Hoffmann-Jørgensen J. Maximal Inequalities for Dependent Random Variables. In: Houdré C, Mason DM, Reynaud-Bouret P, Rosiński J, editors. High Dimensional Probability VII: The Cargèse Volume. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2016. p. 61–104. (Progress in Probability).

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 World Medical Journal.

Blog post

Andrew D. Adorable Panda Twins Born At Smithsonian National Zoo [Internet]. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2015 [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/surprise-panda-twins-born/

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. Space Projects: Status and Remaining Challenges of the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1992 Feb. Report No.: NSIAD-92-77.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Coleman JM. Classroom management: Whose responsibility is it? [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

Vecsey G. Campus Kickoffs: Don’t Think Too Hard. New York Times. 2010 Aug 26;B17.

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	World Medical Journal
ISSN (print)	0049-8122
Scope