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Vancouver citation generator
Paste a DOI, PubMed ID or link and get a Vancouver reference, with the fields shown so you can check them.
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What a reference in Vancouver looks like
The shape is always the same: who, when, what, where. Once you can see it, you can check any reference a generator gives you, including this one.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
n. Author AA. Title of article. Journal Name. Year;Volume(Issue):pages.
1. Aspelmeyer M. Measured measurement. Nat Phys. 2009;5(1):11-12.
BOOK
n. Author AA. Title of book. Place: Publisher; Year.
2. Dahl R. Matilda. London: Jonathan Cape; 1988.
WEB PAGE
n. Title of page [Internet]. Site; Year [cited Year Month Day]. Available from: URL
3. Air quality and health [Internet]. World Health Organization; 2024 [cited 2026 Sep 8]. Available from: https://www.who.int/
Three things Vancouver asks for that people get wrong
Initials have no full stops
Vancouver writes 'Aspelmeyer M', not 'Aspelmeyer, M.'. No comma, no full stops between initials, and the initials run together for multiple given names.
The volume block has no spaces
Year, semicolon, volume, issue in brackets, colon, pages: '2009;5(1):11-12'. Adding spaces around the punctuation is the usual giveaway.
Six authors, then et al.
List up to six authors in full. From the seventh, list six and follow them with et al. Different journals vary this, so check the one you are submitting to.
Need a different style?
Questions
Is Vancouver the same as NLM?
They are closely related. Vancouver is the style described by the ICMJE recommendations, and the US National Library of Medicine publishes the detailed reference guide most people follow.
Are journal titles abbreviated?
Usually, following the NLM catalogue: Nature Physics becomes Nat Phys. Some courses accept full titles.
Is the reference list numbered or alphabetical?
Numbered, in the order the sources are first cited, like IEEE.
THE ANDROID APP
Keep them, export them, and check your draft
CiteRight for Android writes Vancouver and other supported styles, keeps your references in projects, exports a bibliography, and checks a draft sentence by sentence for text that overlaps a source.