Doctors BC

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 56, No. 4, May 2014, Page 170 Letters
By: Nicholas Rety, MD

I recently learned about the change of our association’s name to Doctors of BC. I proposed renaming the association Doctors BC some 30 years ago, as described in an article I wrote for the May 1983 issue of the BC Medical Journal, (BCMJ 1983;25:232-233). I welcome the recent name change but I would delete the word of from the name. It does not roll off the tongue and is redundant. In my view no one would misinterpret Doctors BC as something originating from the government. I would be interested to know how the new name was arrived at and what consultation process was involved. I retired from the practice of urology in Vernon in 1999. From 1974 to 1986 I was an active communications officer for the Vernon Medical Society and worked closely with Jim Gilmore, during whose tenure as director of communications the association’s new logo was introduced.
—Nicholas Rety, MB
Vernon

We have posted Dr Rety’s article online as a matter of historical interest. —ED.

Nicholas Rety, MD. Doctors BC. BCMJ, Vol. 56, No. 4, May, 2014, Page(s) 170 - Letters.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply