Vancouver Citation Generator

How this Vancouver citation generator numbers references and orders the list

Vancouver numbers references in order of first citation, not alphabetically. Paste your sources in the order they appear in the manuscript and the numbering matches. This is the opposite of APA and Harvard, where the list sorts itself and the order you paste in does not matter.

1. LeCun Y, Bengio Y, Hinton G. Deep learning and the future of machine vision. Nature. 2015;521(7553):436-44.

2. Abe K, Ng W, Silva A, Okafor N, Baker T, Cruz M, et al. A clinical trial of something. The Lancet. 2021;397:100-10.

3. Zhang W. A book about things. London: Example Press; 2019.

Surnames first with initials after and no punctuation between them. Article titles are sentence case with no quotation marks. Page ranges are elided, so 436 to 444 becomes 436-44, which is correct and not a truncation error.

In text you get a number in parentheses: (1). Some journals want it in square brackets or superscript instead, which is a house choice rather than a Vancouver rule, so check the journal’s author instructions and reformat if needed. There is no author name or year in the mark, so there is no narrative form to choose between.

As a vancouver bibliography generator it will do the whole reference list in one pass; switch the output to a reference list rather than a single reference.

Two fields to check by hand: journal abbreviations and page numbers in citations

Neither of these is a formatting bug, and both are worth knowing before you submit.

Journal titles come back in full. Vancouver, which is the same thing as ICMJE style and NLM style, requires journal titles abbreviated to the NLM standard abbreviation. CrossRef and Europe PMC store the full title and there is no reliable automatic conversion, so New England Journal of Medicine comes back in full rather than as N Engl J Med. Look the journal up in the NLM Catalog and use its “NLM Title Abbreviation” field, or take it from PubMed’s own Cite button. A reference list on one topic usually has three or four distinct journals in it, so this is a find and replace.

Page numbers do not appear in the in-text citation. Vancouver’s convention is that the number alone identifies the source and the page reference goes in your sentence, so the page field on each row has no effect on the mark for this style. If you need to point at a specific page, write it into the prose: “as reported by Smith (1), page 440”. Other styles on this site put the locator inside the citation, so this is the one that behaves differently.

Sources without a PubMed ID, DOI, arXiv ID, or ISBN cannot be looked up. Conference abstracts with no DOI, package inserts, and clinical guidelines published as web pages all fall in that group and go in by hand.

What the Vancouver citation format is, in short

If you landed here to check the rules rather than to generate anything, this is the whole format in one place.

Vancouver is a numbered style used in medicine, health, and the physical sciences. Every source gets a number the first time you cite it, and that number is reused every later time you cite the same source. The reference list at the end runs in that number order, so it is a record of the order you cited things rather than an alphabetical index.

In text, the number goes in parentheses or square brackets. Both are accepted as long as you are consistent through the document, and journals often state which one they want. Page numbers are not normally included with the citation number.

The reference itself runs: authors, article title, journal, year, volume and issue, pages.

1. LeCun Y, Bengio Y, Hinton G. Deep learning and the future of machine vision. Nature. 2015;521(7553):436-44.

Authors are surname then initials, no full stops between initials, separated by commas, up to six before et al. takes over. The article title is sentence case with no quotation marks. The journal is abbreviated to its NLM form. Year, then a semicolon, then volume with issue in brackets, then a colon and the page range with the second number elided.

The full rule set is Citing Medicine by Patrias and Wendling, which the National Library of Medicine publishes free on NCBI Bookshelf. It is the authority when a library guide and a journal’s instructions disagree.