CitationWithSourcesHow formats are sourced

Vancouver Citation Generator (NLM/ICMJE)

Fill in what you know about the source and get the Vancouver (NLM/ICMJE) entry plus its matching in-text form. Blank fields are simply left out rather than leaving stray punctuation behind.

Authors

No personal author? Leave these blank and use the organisation field below.

Reference entry

Baniya S, Weech S. Data and experience design: Negotiating community-oriented digital research with service-learning. Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement. 2019;6(1):11–16.

In-text (numbered)

[1]

Formatted as Vancouver (NLM/ICMJE). Italics are shown as italics here and stripped when you copy, so the text pastes cleanly into a word processor where you can re-apply them.

A worked example

A two-author journal article with a DOI, formatted as Vancouver (NLM/ICMJE). This is generated by the same code the tool above uses, so it is never out of step with the generator.

Reference

Baniya S, Weech S. Data and experience design: Negotiating community-oriented digital research with service-learning. Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement. 2019;6(1):11–16.

In-text (numbered)

[1]

The same style applied to a single-author book, where the fields available are quite different — no volume, no issue, no DOI, but a publisher instead:

Gleick J. Chaos: Making a New Science. Penguin; 1987.

In-text: [1]

Where these rules come from

Citation formats are only useful if they match what the style body actually publishes, so each rule here is transcribed from a cited source rather than written from memory:

Frequently Asked Questions

How many authors before Vancouver uses “et al.”?

Six. NLM/ICMJE's own sample-references page lists the first six authors, followed by et al. for anything larger — note that this differs from NLM's own MEDLINE/PubMed database practice, which now lists every author; the six-then-et-al. form is what ICMJE tells authors to submit.

Why aren't journal names abbreviated here?

Real Vancouver references use NLM's own journal abbreviations (e.g. “N Engl J Med”), which come from a large, maintained NLM database this tool doesn't embed. Type the journal name or abbreviation you want to appear — this generator applies Vancouver's punctuation and ordering rules around whatever you enter, rather than guessing at an abbreviation it can't verify.

Why does this only offer journal articles, books and book chapters?

Those are the source types this site could verify against NLM/ICMJE's own published sample references. Vancouver format for websites, datasets and other material differs enough — different bracketed labels, access-date conventions — that adding them without a verified example each would risk the exact mistake this site is built to avoid.

What does the numbered in-text citation mean?

Vancouver cites sources by a bracketed number in the order they're first cited in the text, like [1], then reuses that same number every time the same source is cited again. The reference list is ordered by citation number, not alphabetically by author.

Where do these formatting rules come from?

Every rule on this page is transcribed from the published Vancouver (NLM/ICMJE) guidance listed in the sources box below, and the site's test suite reproduces those sources' own worked examples exactly. If a change ever stopped matching a real published citation, the tests would fail.

Should I check the output before submitting it?

Yes. A generator handles the common shapes of a source well, but real bibliographies contain awkward cases — a chapter in a translated edition, a report with a corporate author and a series number, a source with no date. Treat the output as a well-formed draft and check anything unusual against your style manual or your institution's guidance.

Other citation styles

Switching styles changes more than punctuation — name order, date position and title capitalisation all move, so the same source looks quite different in each.