How to format your references using the Medical Sciences citation style

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

Müller, R.D. Geophysics. Sedimentary Basins Feeling the Heat from Below. Science 2010, 329, 769–770.

A journal article with 2 authors

Brunnschweiler, C.N.; Bulte, E.H. Economics. Linking Natural Resources to Slow Growth and More Conflict. Science 2008, 320, 616–617.

A journal article with 3 authors

Planutis, K.; Planutiene, M.; Holcombe, R.F. A Novel Signaling Pathway Regulates Colon Cancer Angiogenesis through Norrin. Sci. Rep. 2014, 4, 5630.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Crichton, W.A.; Mezouar, M.; Grande, T.; Stølen, S.; Grzechnik, A. Breakdown of Intermediate-Range Order in Liquid GeSe(2) at High Pressure. Nature 2001, 414, 622–625.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Van Fleet, P.J. Discrete Wavelet Transformations; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ, 2008; ISBN 9781118032404.

An edited book

Advances in Natural Computation: First International Conference, ICNC 2005, Changsha, China, August 27-29, 2005, Proceedings, Part III; Wang, L., Chen, K., Ong, Y.S., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2005; Vol. 3612; ISBN 9783540283201.

A chapter in an edited book

Baker, P.; Dai, Z.R.; Grabowski, J.; Haugen, Ø.; Schieferdecker, I.; Williams, C. Unit Level Testing. In Model-Driven Testing; Dai, Z.R., Grabowski, J., Haugen, Ø., Schieferdecker, I., Williams, C., Eds.; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007; pp. 51–61 ISBN 9783540725626.

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 Sciences.

Blog post

Andrew, D. How Our Autistic Ancestors Played An Important Role In Human Evolution (accessed on 30 October 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 FCC: Policies and Rules Concerning Children’s Television Programming--Revision of Programming Policies for Television Broadcast Stations; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1996;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Tang, J. Understanding the College Experiences of Cambodian American Students. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach: Long Beach, CA, 2013.

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

Paulson, M. Broadway Revival Set For Lauded ‘Angels.’ New York Times 2017, C2.

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 Sciences
Abbreviation	Med. Sci. (Basel)
ISSN (online)	2076-3271
Scope