How to format your references using the BMC Urology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BMC Urology. 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. Lewis SL. How to beat the media in the climate street fight. Nature. 2010;468:7.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Zhu M, Yu X. A primitive fish close to the common ancestor of tetrapods and lungfish. Nature. 2002;418:767–70.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Bazin E, Glémin S, Galtier N. Population size does not influence mitochondrial genetic diversity in animals. Science. 2006;312:570–2.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Roche S, Rey FA, Gaudin Y, Bressanelli S. Structure of the prefusion form of the vesicular stomatitis virus glycoprotein G. Science. 2007;315:843–8.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Hoschette JA. The Engineer’s Career Guide. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2010.

An edited book

1. Zadeh LA, Abbasov AM, Yager RR, Shahbazova SN, Reformat MZ, editors. Recent Developments and New Directions in Soft Computing. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Pangracious V, Marrakchi Z, Mehrez H. Two Dimensional FPGAs: Configuration and CAD Flow. In: Marrakchi Z, Mehrez H, editors. Three-Dimensional Design Methodologies for Tree-based FPGA Architecture. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015. p. 73–94.

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 Urology.

Blog post

1. Andrew E. How Much Sugar Is It OK To Eat? IFLScience. 2016. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/how-much-sugar-it-ok-eat/. 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. Transportation and Telecommunications Issue Area: Active Assignments. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1995.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Grugan PK. The mindfulness practice of clinicians: A systematic review. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach; 2016.

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. Williams J. Long Live the Prince. New York Times. 2017;:BR9.

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 Urology
Abbreviation	BMC Urol.
ISSN (online)	1471-2490
Scope	General Medicine Reproductive Medicine Urology