How to format your references using the BMC Oral Health citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BMC Oral Health. 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	Download the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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. Schmollinger J. Gaining a lot from translation. Nature. 2002;418:5.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Pimm SL, Brown JH. Ecology. Domains of diversity. Science. 2004;304:831–3.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Cziczo DJ, Thomson DS, Murphy DM. Ablation, flux, and atmospheric implications of meteors inferred from stratospheric aerosol. Science. 2001;291:1772–5.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Folli V, Ghofraniha N, Puglisi A, Leuzzi L, Conti C. Time-resolved dynamics of granular matter by random laser emission. Sci Rep. 2013;3:2251.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Siddiqi N. Intelligent Credit Scoring. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2017.

An edited book

1. Clément G, Bukley A, editors. Artificial Gravity. New York, NY: Springer; 2007.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Feng Y, Luo S, Pan L. An Extensive Method to Detect the Image Digital Watermarking Based on the Known Template. In: Zhuang Y, Yang S-Q, Rui Y, He Q, editors. Advances in Multimedia Information Processing - PCM 2006: 7th Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia, Hangzhou, China, November 2-4, 2006. Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2006. p. 31–40.

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 BMC Oral Health.

Blog post

1. Andrew E. We Talk To Neil deGrasse Tyson About Mars One, Being A Geek, And How To Get People Excited About Science. IFLScience. 2015. https://www.iflscience.com/space/startalk-back-iflscience-catches-neil-degrasse-tyson/. Accessed 30 Oct 2018.

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. National Highway System: Refinements Would Strengthen the System. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1994.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Robles B. Academic achievement among foster care children with a disability: A grant proposal. Doctoral dissertation. 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. Gorman J. Nowhere to Run: Outside Refuges, Cheetahs Face Outsize Threats. New York Times. 2016;:D2.

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	BMC Oral Health
Abbreviation	BMC Oral Health
ISSN (online)	1472-6831
Scope	General Dentistry