Vancouver (ICMJE) reference style
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Used by medicine, nursing, public health, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, biomedical research. CitePlain emits the current edition by default. We never paywall it.
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Example output
Yeh RW, Valsdottir LR, Yeh MW, Shen C, Kramer DB, Strom JB, et al. Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial. BMJ. 2018;363:k5094. doi:10.1136/bmj.k5094
Edition guide
Vancouver style was created in 1978 at a meeting of medical-journal editors in Vancouver, British Columbia, and is now maintained by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). The US National Library of Medicine published the canonical formatting rules in Citing Medicine, 2nd edition. NEJM, JAMA, BMJ, Lancet, Nature Medicine, and the majority of PubMed-indexed journals use Vancouver or a close variant.
Quick rules
Vancouver is a citation-sequence system. The first source you cite in the text gets the number 1; the second new source gets 2; reused sources keep their original number. The reference list at the end of the paper is ordered by appearance, not alphabetically. CitePlain emits the reference-list entry without a leading number so you can drop it into your bibliography in the correct slot.
List up to six authors before truncating with et al. Each author is written as Surname followed by space then initials with no periods. Author names are separated by commas. A trailing period closes the author block. Example: Smith JR, Lee K, Yamamoto H, Patel S, Ng A, Becker M, et al.
Vancouver requires the abbreviated journal title from the NLM Catalog (Nature → Nature; New England Journal of Medicine → N Engl J Med). After the journal title, the format is year semicolon volume issue colon pages period. Example: N Engl J Med. 2024;391(12):1085-1097. CitePlain emits the full journal title by default; substitute the NLM abbreviation if your target journal requires it.
Vancouver formats DOIs as the bare prefix doi colon then the DOI identifier. No https URL is required. Example: doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2401234. If the source has no DOI, append the URL after Available from: with a colon space.
Web pages, online-first articles, and electronic documents are flagged with the medium designator [Internet] after the title. Add a cited date in square brackets year month day. The retrieval clause Available from: precedes the URL.