Vancouver Referencing — Complete Guide

Vancouver referencing — overview

Vancouver style is a numbered referencing system used primarily in biomedical and health sciences — medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, physiotherapy, and related fields. It is based on the ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) Uniform Requirements, and is the citation standard for major medical journals including The Lancet, BMJ, and JAMA.

Sources are numbered sequentially as they appear in the text. Each number corresponds to a full reference in the numbered reference list at the end of the paper. The same number is reused every time the same source is cited — unlike Harvard or APA, where you write the author name each time.

• In-text: Superscript numbers (¹) or numbers in brackets [1] — check your institution's preference
• Reference list: Numbered in order of first appearance (not alphabetical)
• Journal abbreviations: Journal names are abbreviated using NLM (National Library of Medicine) abbreviations

In-text citations

Place the citation number immediately after the information being cited — after the punctuation if at the end of a sentence, or mid-sentence if citing a specific claim:

Reusing citations

Once a source has been assigned a number, that same number is used every subsequent time the source is cited. The reference list entry is NOT repeated — it appears only once under its original number.

Range of citations

Reference list rules

• Title the page References
• Number entries sequentially (1. 2. 3…) in the order they first appear in the text — NOT alphabetically
• Abbreviate journal names using NLM standard abbreviations (look up PubMed's NLM Catalog for the correct abbreviation)
• List all authors if 6 or fewer; if 7 or more, list the first 6 then add "et al."
• Article titles: plain text, sentence case, no quotation marks
• Journal names: italicised, abbreviated
• Volume in bold, issue in parentheses (some variants omit issue number)

Journal article

Book

Chapter in edited book

Website

Clinical guideline / report

Author name rules in Vancouver

• Author names: Surname followed by initials with no full stops and no space between initials — "Smith AB" not "Smith, A. B."
• Up to 6 authors: list all, separated by commas
• 7 or more: first 6, then "et al."
• Organisations as authors: write the full organisation name — "World Health Organization" not "WHO" (unless WHO is the official abbreviated name)
• No author: start the reference with the title of the work

Common Vancouver mistakes

• Alphabetising the reference list — Vancouver is numbered in order of appearance, NOT alphabetical
• Assigning a new number to a source already cited — reuse the original number
• Writing journal names in full — Vancouver uses NLM abbreviations (N Engl J Med not New England Journal of Medicine)
• Using full stops after author initials — "Smith A.B." should be "Smith AB"
• Listing more than 6 authors without truncating to "et al."
• Omitting the edition statement for textbooks — always include edition for 2nd edition and beyond