How to cite a conference paper in BMJ
A paper presented at and published in conference proceedings. The BMJ's modified Vancouver style.
Quick answer
To cite a conference paper in BMJ, include the author(s), year, title, and container or publisher details. A concrete example is below.
Example
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., and Parmar, N.. Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NeurIPS 2017). 2017:5998-6008.
This example is rendered with the official CSL definition for BMJ. For the exact style required by your journal, paste your references into DEEPNOTIS and pick that style from the dropdown — the app covers 2,800+ variants.
Official source
BMJ is defined and maintained by the The BMJ. When a formatting rule is ambiguous, their official guidance is the authoritative reference. DEEPNOTIS renders BMJ from the same canonical CSL definition.
What you need
For a conference paper, BMJ expects these fields at minimum:
- Author(s)
- Year
- Paper title
- Proceedings / conference name
- Page range
- Publisher or sponsor
Common mistakes
- Mixing bibliography formatting with in-text citation rules. Reference-list entries and in-text cites follow different patterns — use the style's official guide for both.
- Forgetting the DOI. When a DOI exists, most styles now require it (usually as a full https://doi.org/… URL).
- Inconsistent capitalization. APA uses sentence case for titles; MLA and Chicago use title case. Mixing them is the single most common style error.
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Last updated: 5 May 2026