Vancouver referencing style: a complete guide with examples

Vancouver is the numeric referencing style of medicine and the health sciences. If you are writing a dissertation in medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, or biomedical science, it is probably the style your school names, and it is the one most biomedical journals expect. Citations appear as numbers in the text, and the reference list runs in order of first mention.

The name comes from a 1978 meeting of medical journal editors in Vancouver, British Columbia. That group grew into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), whose recommendations define the style's principles, while the US National Library of Medicine codifies the exact reference formats you see in PubMed records.

This guide walks through the in-text conventions, the reference formats for the main source types, worked examples you can copy the shape of, the mistakes markers flag most often, and how to generate Vancouver references automatically.

Where Vancouver style comes from: ICMJE and the NLM

Two authorities sit behind Vancouver style. The ICMJE recommendations set the principles: number sources consecutively in the order they are first mentioned, and reuse that number for every later citation. The NLM's Citing Medicine sets the entry formats: how authors, titles, journal abbreviations, dates, and pages are written.

In practice, universities publish their own Vancouver guides with small local variations, most visibly whether in-text numbers are superscript, in parentheses, or in square brackets. Check your school's guide first; where it is silent, follow the NLM formats shown here and stay consistent from the first page to the last. Most disagreements between guides are cosmetic; the numbering logic and the entry order never change.

One ICMJE detail worth knowing early: personal communications and unpublished observations are cited in the text only, with the source's permission, and never appear in the reference list. Everything in the list must be something a reader can retrieve.

Vancouver in-text citations: numbered in order of first mention

The mechanics are simple and unforgiving: the first source you cite is 1, the second is 2, and each source keeps its number for the entire document. Place each number directly after the claim it supports rather than collecting citations at the end of the paragraph; the number is a pointer, and a pointer that gestures at four sentences at once is not much use to a marker.

The rules in brief:

• Number sources consecutively in the order they first appear.
• Reuse the original number every time you cite the source again.
• Cite multiple sources together with commas: (1,3,7).
• Compress runs of consecutive numbers into a range: (2-5).
• Superscript, parentheses, and square brackets are all in circulation; pick the variant your school or target journal uses and never mix them.
• You can still name authors in prose ('Okafor and colleagues found'), but the number, not the name, is the citation.

Vancouver reference list rules that apply to every entry

The list is numbered to match the text, so entry 7 is always the seventh source you first cited. Formatting is deliberately plain: no italics, no quotation marks, and minimal punctuation, which makes small deviations easy for a marker to spot. The plainness is inherited from index cataloguing: entries are optimised for fast scanning in a long list, not for typographic elegance.

The conventions every entry follows:

• Authors: surname then initials, with no periods between initials: Chen L, Okafor P.
• List the first six authors; for seven or more, give six and then et al.
• Article titles in sentence case, with no quotation marks.
• Journal titles abbreviated to their NLM form: N Engl J Med, not The New England Journal of Medicine.
• Date, volume, issue, and pages run together with no spaces: 2020;382(8):727-33.
• Closing page numbers are elided: 727-33, not 727-733.

How to cite a journal article in Vancouver style

The template: Author AA, Author BB. Title of article. Abbrev J Title. Year;volume(issue):pages.

A made-up example with every element in place: Chen L, Okafor P, Alvarez M. Beta-blockade after myocardial infarction in older adults. Eur Heart J. 2024;45(12):1044-52. Note the sentence-case title, the abbreviated journal, the semicolon between year and volume, and the elided page range. An older article without a DOI cites identically; the DOI is an addition, not a replacement for any element.

Many schools now require a DOI for articles read online; when yours does, append it after the pagination as doi: 10.1000/xyz123. If the journal uses article numbers instead of page ranges, cite the article number in the pagination slot. Neither addition changes anything else in the entry. For articles published online ahead of print, give the year and the DOI and write 'Epub ahead of print' where the pagination would go.

Books, chapters, and reports in Vancouver style

A book: Author AA. Title of book. 4th ed. London: Publisher; 2019. The edition statement follows the title, and the place of publication comes before the publisher, separated by a colon.

A chapter in an edited book: Author AA. Chapter title. In: Editor BB, editor. Title of book. 2nd ed. Oxford: Publisher; 2021. p. 101-25. The 'In:' construction and the 'p.' before elided pages are both mandatory, and both are frequently forgotten.

Reports and guidelines use the issuing organisation as the author: World Health Organization. Title of the report. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2023. Repeat the organisation as publisher when it published its own report.

A thesis or dissertation: Author AA. Title of thesis [dissertation]. City: University; 2022. The bracketed designator tells the reader what kind of document they are chasing, the same device Vancouver uses for [Internet], [Preprint], and [dataset].

Websites, datasets, and preprints in Vancouver style

Web sources carry an [Internet] marker, a cited date, and an 'Available from:' statement followed by the full page address: Organisation. Title of page [Internet]. Geneva: Publisher; 2023 [cited 2026 Jul 20]. Available from: the full address of the page. The cited date is your access date, and examiners look for it because web content moves.

Preprints must be labelled so the reader knows the work has not been peer reviewed: Author AA. Title of the preprint. medRxiv [Preprint]. 2024 [cited 2026 Jul 20]. Datasets take a [dataset] designator in the same spirit. In a medical thesis, presenting a preprint as a published article is precisely the kind of detail that surfaces in a viva. Cite the dataset itself when you analysed the data, not merely the paper that first described it; they are different objects with different citations.

Worked example: a methods paragraph and its references

Consider this passage: 'Sampling followed established guidance for cluster randomised trials (1,2). Outcomes were defined according to the core outcome set for this population (3), and all analyses followed the published protocol (2).' Sources 1 and 2 keep the numbers they were given at first mention; only source 3 is new here. If you later insert a new source earlier in the chapter, all three of these numbers shift, which is the subject of the warning below.

The matching entries, in citation order:

• 1. Chen L, Okafor P. Cluster randomised designs in community health research. BMJ. 2022;377:e068001.
• 2. Alvarez M, Ito S, Baumann T. Protocol fidelity in pragmatic trials. Trials. 2023;24(1):112-20.
• 3. Osei R, Haddad N, Virtanen A, Larsson E, Moreau C, Diallo A, et al. A core outcome set for community hypertension trials. Lancet. 2024;403(10425):331-9.

Vancouver referencing tips for a thesis or dissertation

Beyond the entry formats, a few habits make Vancouver manageable across a long document.

None of these are style rules exactly; they are how you avoid the rework that numeric styles invite. The style rewards writers who treat the reference list as data to be generated, not text to be typed.

• Confirm the in-text variant (superscript, parentheses, or brackets) with your school before you write, not after.
• Verify each article's details against its PubMed record, not against a citation you found in someone else's reference list.
• Record the DOI for every article as you collect it; adding DOIs later means reopening every paper.
• Cite the version you read: if that was the preprint, label it as a preprint even if a journal version now exists.
• Check NLM journal abbreviations one by one; guessing produces plausible but wrong forms.
• Leave the numbering to software; hand-maintained numbers do not survive revision.

Common Vancouver referencing mistakes

The classics, in rough order of frequency. Check your list against them before you submit:

• Alphabetising the reference list instead of keeping citation order.
• Punctuating initials (Chen L. J.) when Vancouver uses none (Chen LJ).
• Using full journal titles instead of NLM abbreviations.
• Adding italics or quotation marks to article or journal titles.
• Writing full closing page numbers (727-733) where Vancouver elides (727-33).
• Cutting to et al. after three authors, which is AMA's rule for seven or more, not Vancouver's first six.
• Forgetting the [cited ...] date or the 'Available from:' statement on web sources.

The renumbering trap in numeric styles

The structural mistake deserves its own warning: hand-renumbering. Insert one new citation into an early chapter and every subsequent number shifts, in the text and in the list. Manual fixes the night before a deadline are how (14) ends up pointing at the wrong trial, and a marker who checks three citations at random will find it.

The fix is not more care; it is not doing the job by hand at all. Numbering should be derived from the text by software, so one insertion updates every downstream citation and entry in a single pass.

Generate Vancouver citations automatically

The free Vancouver citation generator turns a DOI or paper details into a correctly formatted reference, including the NLM journal abbreviation and elided page range, so the fiddly parts are never typed.

For a full dissertation, the Reference Manager treats every citation as a database object linked to a real paper. Numbering and ordering are derived automatically, so inserting a citation renumbers the list for you, and you can switch a project between Vancouver and eleven other styles without retyping an entry. Because every citation resolves to a real paper, the Fact Checker can also verify that the sentence you attached it to is actually supported by the source's full text.

Retractions matter more in biomedicine than in any other field. In CiteDash, retracted papers carry a retraction badge and are blocked from citation, and you can run any DOI through the free retraction checker before you build an argument on it.