BMJ style error

LiborA

I found this error in the BMJ style:
The output from the style template for an article with issue but without volume looks like

Authors Title. Publication Year;:pages

In the examples on a page with instruction for authors you can see this example:

Morse SS. Factors in the emergency of infectious diseases. Emerg Infect Dis 1995 Jan-Mar;1(1). www.cdc.gov/nciod/EID/vol1no1/morse.htm (accessed 5 Jun 1998).

You can see volume(issue)
I am not sure, if the better solution for articles with issue but without volume is

Authors Title. Publication Year;issue:pages

or

Authors Title. Publication Year;(issue):pages

bwiernik

Typically, articles would have a volume but no issue, rather than the reverse. What is the example you have of the reverse pattern?

LiborA

I know several journals which use mainly year and issue in the year, for example, 2017/6.

adamsmith

We should be able to handle that elegantly with delimiters. I'll take a look.

LiborA

Typically, articles would have a volume but no issue, rather than the reverse. What is the example you have of the reverse pattern?

It is the semantic problem probably only in my mind. The term "volume" is commonly translated to the Czech as the "ročník". The word "ročník" describes how many years the journal is published. Our institutional journal VTEI is published from 1958 and currently, it is ročník (volume) 59. The first publication in each year has number 1. For example 1/2017. It is typical for the Czech journals. It so typical, that I have to admit that I have never understood the continuous numbering of "issues".
If I correctly understand your note, then the journal numbered continuously has the only volume. But if the number of journal starts every year from 1 then it is the issue and item "volume" contain a number of years of publication of the journal or the year. Am I right?

adamsmith

Not quite. Even continuously issued journals like Nature would have a separate volume and issue number, e.g. Nature currently is at volume 552, issue 7683.
You'd occasionally find journals with only a single issue per year/volume to not bother with issue numbers or you would find people leaving them out of the metadata on purpose (because journals are continuously paginated, so it's not crucial information).

While volume numbers are _typically_ indeed the years since publications, some journals do give the year as a volume number and I'd put that into the volume field.