How to format your references using the Medical Principles and Practice citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Medical Principles and Practice. 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

King JS. Genetic tests: Politics and fetal diagnostics collide. Nature. 2012 Nov;491(7422):33–4.

A journal article with 2 authors

Hartmann DL, Hendon HH. Atmospheric science. Resolving an atmospheric enigma. Science. 2007 Dec;318(5857):1731–2.

A journal article with 3 authors

Hÿtch MJ, Putaux J-L, Pénisson J-M. Measurement of the displacement field of dislocations to 0.03 A by electron microscopy. Nature. 2003 May;423(6937):270–3.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Seneviratne SI, Lüthi D, Litschi M, Schär C. Land-atmosphere coupling and climate change in Europe. Nature. 2006 Sep;443(7108):205–9.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chin E, Nel D, Ólafsson S. Problems and Solutions in Mathematical Finance. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2014.

An edited book

Severi F, editor. Teorema di Riemann-Roch e questioni connesse. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

Xu Y, Liu K. Evolutionary Grooming of Traffic in WDM Optical Networks. In: Jain LC, Palade V, Srinivasan D, editors. Advances in Evolutionary Computing for System Design. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2007; pp 95–137.

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 Medical Principles and Practice.

Blog post

Davis J. Smartphone App Allows Tourists To Monitor Illegal Wildlife Crime [Internet]. IFLScience. 2016 May [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/smartphone-app-allows-tourists-monitor-illegal-wildlife-crime/

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. Year 2000 Computing Challenge: Federal Business Continuity and Contingency Plans and Day One Strategies. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1999.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Reig MA. Cross-Dialectal Variability in Propositional Anaphora: A Quantitative and Pragmatic Study of Null Objects in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. 2008

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

Schmitt E, Bradsher K. After Pair of Crashes in 2 Months, Navy Will Pause for Safety Check. New York Times. 2017 Aug;A1.

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	Medical Principles and Practice
Abbreviation	Med. Princ. Pract.
ISSN (print)	1011-7571
ISSN (online)	1423-0151
Scope	General Medicine