AMA Citation Generator
Free. No signup. Runs in your browser.
Paste a PubMed ID or DOI and get an AMA 11th edition reference back, numbered, with the superscript in-text citation alongside it. PubMed IDs resolve through Europe PMC and DOIs through CrossRef, so author lists and page ranges match the indexed record. Upload a .nbib export straight from PubMed, or a .ris or .bib file, and this ama citation generator will convert the batch in one pass.
How this AMA citation generator numbers references and formats the superscript citation
AMA numbers references in order of first citation, not alphabetically, so paste your sources in the order they appear in the manuscript and the numbering comes out right.
1. LeCun Y, Bengio Y, Hinton G. Deep learning and the future of machine vision. Nature. 2015;521(7553):436-444. doi:10.1038/nature14539
2. Abe K, Ng W, Silva A, et al. A clinical trial of something. The Lancet. 2021;397:100-110.
Surnames come first with initials after and no full stops between them, so “LeCun Y” rather than “Y. LeCun” or “LeCun, Y.” Article titles are sentence case with no quotation marks. The volume, issue, and page block runs together as 2015;521(7553):436-444, and the DOI has no space after the colon.
In text, an AMA citation is a superscript number, not a bracketed one: it renders as a raised 1 rather than [1]. When you copy a citation from this page you get the number as plain text, because a clipboard cannot carry superscript into every destination. Apply superscript formatting in your document, which in Word is Ctrl+Shift+= and in Google Docs is Ctrl+.
A page number goes inside the citation in AMA’s own format, 1(p440), rather than after it. Type the page into the field on the row and the mark updates.
Journal names come back in full and AMA wants the NLM abbreviation
This is the one field to fix by hand, and it is worth knowing before you paste an entire reference list.
AMA Manual of Style section 3.11.2 requires journal titles to be abbreviated using the National Library of Medicine’s standard abbreviations. So The Lancet stays Lancet, Nature stays Nature, but Journal of the American Medical Association becomes JAMA, and New England Journal of Medicine becomes N Engl J Med.
CrossRef and Europe PMC store the full journal title, not the NLM abbreviation, and there is no lookup that reliably converts one to the other, so any ama reference generator working from identifiers gives you the full name. This one does too, and says so rather than letting you find out from a marker.
To fix it: search the journal in the NLM Catalog and use the “NLM Title Abbreviation” field. PubMed’s own Cite button also gives the abbreviated form. For a reference list on one topic you are usually abbreviating three or four distinct journals, so it is a find and replace rather than an entry-by-entry edit.
Everything else in the reference comes from the indexed record and does not need checking this way.
Anything without a PubMed ID, DOI, arXiv ID, or ISBN cannot be resolved. In practice that means package inserts, clinical guidelines, and conference abstracts with no DOI, which you add by hand.
Frequently asked questions
AMA lists up to six authors in full. At seven or more it gives the first three followed by et al. That is a different threshold from Vancouver, which lists six then switches, so the two styles diverge on exactly the papers with long author lists.
No, though they look similar and both come out of medical publishing. Both number references in citation order, but AMA uses superscript numerals and Vancouver uses numbers in parentheses or brackets, and the author thresholds differ. If your journal asked for Vancouver, use the Vancouver citation generator instead.
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