All the sources are right :-) With BFS you visit each vertex and each edge exactly once, resulting in linear complexity. Now, if it's a completely connected graph, i.e. each pair of vertices is connected by an edge, then the number of edges grows quadratic with the number of vertices:
|E| = |V| * (|V|-1) / 2
Then one might say the complexity of BFS is quadratic in the number of vertices: O(|V|+|E|) = O(|V|^2)