Hello all,
I got a question from a faculty member today who was confused about the citation format for an article from a BioMed Central (BMC) title. The faculty member's confusion centered around trying to find a page number range for the citation, as well as trying to cite a specific page number for a direct quote.
This is the citation:
Herman, P., Craig, B., & Caspi, O. (2005). Is complementary and alternative medicine(CAM) cost-effective? A systematic review. BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 5:11
The article is available at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6882/5/11. If you look at the PDF version of the article, you'll notice it says, "page number not for citation purposes" at the bottom of each page.
As a reminder, BMC is an open access publisher, and most of their journal titles are published only in online form. Because it never appears in printed form, it's not paginated the way articles normally are. The citation gives a volume number (5) and an article number (11), which is all you need to cite the article. This link gives you further information about citing BMC titles: http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/faq?name=citation
My response to the faculty member was that for the reference list, the article would be cited as it appears above. To cite a direct quote from the article (which requires a page number in the in-text citation in APA format), I think it's fine to use the PDF page number. My interpretation is that the "not for citation" designation means that you wouldn't put 1-15 as a page range in the citation in your reference list, but for an in-text citation, the PDF page number seems appropriate.
I hope this is helpful. Let me know if you have any questions, or if you would have given the faculty member a different answer!
Thanks,
Liz