Need a different style?
The full Citation Generator covers APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, AMA, ACS, IEEE, Vancouver, and the 10,000+ other styles in the CSL registry.
Paste a DOI, URL, or ISBN. Get back a clean reference in Vancouver style — the numbered system used by biomedical journals worldwide, defined by the ICMJE recommendations and NLM. Free, no signup.
Tip: Paste a URL, DOI, or ISBN for automatic metadata lookup.
Vancouver style was first agreed in 1978 by a group of medical-journal editors meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. The group eventually became the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), and the recommendations they publish — now updated regularly online — define Vancouver style. The U.S. National Library of Medicine's Citing Medicine handbook codifies the formatting. Vancouver is the default for The Lancet, BMJ, BMC, PLoS Medicine, and most non-US biomedical journals. The format is similar to AMA but not identical — AMA is the US standard, Vancouver is the international one.
1. Tversky A, Kahneman D. Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Science. 1974 Sep;185(4157):1124-31.
Vancouver uses numbered in-text citations, either as superscript or in parentheses. Numbers appear in the order each source is first cited and are reused on subsequent citations. Stacking: (1,2) or as a range (1-3). Some journals prefer parentheses around the number, others prefer superscript — check the target journal's instructions for authors.
Antibiotic stewardship reduces resistance (1).
Reference-list entries number in citation order, not alphabetized. Author names: surname plus initials with no periods, comma-separated. List the first six authors; for seven or more, list the first six followed by "et al." Article titles use sentence case with no italics. Journal names use the official NLM abbreviation. No italics on the journal name in standard Vancouver (this differs from AMA, which italicizes it). Year, volume, issue, page range follow in compact punctuation.
Each input goes through the right source. DOIs hit Crossref directly, since that's where they're registered. ISBNs resolve through library and publisher records. URLs get scraped for embedded metadata (DOI in the source, OG tags, schema.org). If nothing's there, we fall back to Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex. Once the canonical record lands, the CSL engine renders the citation in Vancouver. That's the same engine Zotero and Mendeley run, the same one behind most journal submission portals.
Both number references in citation order; both abbreviate journal names; both use surname + initials for authors. The main differences are italicization (AMA italicizes journal names, Vancouver doesn't) and a couple of punctuation details around DOIs and page ranges. Vancouver is the international biomedical standard; AMA is the US clinical default.
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) publishes the recommendations that define Vancouver. The U.S. National Library of Medicine maintains Citing Medicine, which codifies the specific reference formatting. Updates appear on the ICMJE website.
Check the target journal. The Lancet uses superscript; BMJ uses parenthetical numbers; PLoS Medicine uses square brackets. The generator outputs the parenthetical form by default — switch if your target journal specifies otherwise.
Vancouver treats reports and guidelines as separate categories. List the issuing body as the author, the report title, the city of publication, the publisher (often the same as the author for government reports), and the year. The generator builds the right structure when you paste a URL or DOI.
Yes. Format as doi: 10.xxxx at the end of the reference. Some journals omit the DOI when one isn't available; others require it whenever it exists. Default to including the DOI — it's the most reliable identifier.
Vancouver allows PMIDs as a supplementary identifier alongside the DOI. The generator pulls both automatically when you paste a PubMed URL or PMID — the output includes whichever the target journal prefers.
The full Citation Generator covers APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, AMA, ACS, IEEE, Vancouver, and the 10,000+ other styles in the CSL registry.
Already wrote your references in another style? Drop the list into the Citation Converter to reformat the whole bibliography in one click.
Got a reference and want to check it? Run it through the AI Citation Checker to confirm the source exists and the metadata matches.
Have a sentence but no citation? The Find Source tool searches Crossref, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, OpenAlex, and PubMed for supporting peer-reviewed papers.
Save every Vancouver citation you generate to your Works Cited library, then export the finished list to Word, BibTeX, or RIS.
Run the final draft through the Writing Assistant to check grammar, clarity, and academic tone before submitting.