Dr Salvian replies

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 49, No. 9, November 2007, Page 472 Letters
By: Anthony J. Salvian, MD

When you write an editorial you hope that it engenders thought and reaction. Obviously, how crime affects our social fabric fits the bill.

I appreciate Dr Williams’s opinion and I wonder if he has been to Vancouver, where we have several hundred criminals with several hundred convictions who have never done any jail time. Each of them costs about $750 000 per year in stolen goods. Dr Williams may feel that the programs he has suggested would eradicate this crime, but we have many such programs and the problem continues to increase. In the current system these criminals carry on with impunity; I suggest that some incarceration may help as a deterrent.

I was more concerned, however, with the serious crime. I bet that, when one looks at cases where a teenager working in a gas station has been killed for a tank of gas, or innocent bystanders have been killed by street racers, or children have been beaten unconscious and given permanent brain damage by hooligans, even the people of Willowdale might want to see jail time measured in years rather than months.

If those sentiments make me mean-spirited, then, I’m guilty.

Anthony J. Salvian, MD. Dr Salvian replies. BCMJ, Vol. 49, No. 9, November, 2007, Page(s) 472 - 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