How to format your references using the British Journal of Cancer citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for British Journal of Cancer (BJC). 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

van Dam K (2007) A more attractive career. Nature 446: 946.

A journal article with 2 authors

Papke RT, Gogarten JP (2012) Ecology. How bacterial lineages emerge. Science 336: 45–46.

A journal article with 3 authors

Grirrane A, Corma A, García H (2008) Gold-catalyzed synthesis of aromatic azo compounds from anilines and nitroaromatics. Science 322: 1661–1664.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Georgiou G, Tyagi HK, Mulder P, Bauhuis GJ, Schermer JJ, Rivas JG (2014) Photo-generated THz antennas. Sci Rep 4: 3584.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Thyagarajan KS (2010) Still Image and Video Compression with MATLAB (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

An edited book

Zhu G (2012) NMR of Proteins and Small Biomolecules (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer).

A chapter in an edited book

Slota M, Baláž M, Leite J (2014) On Supporting Strong and Default Negation in Answer-Set Program Updates. In Advances in Artificial Intelligence -- IBERAMIA 2014: 14th Ibero-American Conference on AI, Santiago de Chile, Chile, November 24-27, 2014, Proceedings, A.L.C. Bazzan, and K. Pichara, eds. (Cham: Springer International Publishing), pp. 41–53.

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 British Journal of Cancer.

Blog post

Luntz S (2017) Even Without The Asteroid, Dinosaurs Faced Double Doom (IFLScience) (accessed: 30/10/2018).

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

Government Accountability Office (2008) Digital Television Transition: Broadcasters’ Transition Status, Low-Power Station Issues, and Information on Consumer Awareness of the DTV Transition (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Buckingham T (2012) Every teacher an English teacher? Literacy strategy teaching and research in the content area of science education. Doctoral dissertation. Indiana University.

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

Brantley B (2017) Lost and Found in a Magic Tale of Nomads. New York Times C5.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (van Dam, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (van Dam, 2007; Papke & Gogarten, 2012).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Papke & Gogarten, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Georgiou et al, 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	British Journal of Cancer
Abbreviation	Br. J. Cancer
ISSN (print)	0007-0920
ISSN (online)	1532-1827
Scope	Cancer Research Oncology