LibGuides: Citation and Referencing: Introduction

Introduction

Vancouver is a numbered referencing style commonly used in medicine and science, and consists of:

Citations to someone else's work in the text, indicated by the use of a number.
A sequentially numbered reference list at the end of the document providing full details of the corresponding in-text reference.

In 1978 a small group of editors of medical journals met in Vancouver, British Columbia, to establish guidelines for authors who wished to submit articles to their publications. Its requirements for manuscripts, including citation formats for references developed by the National Library of Medicine, became informally known as the “Vancouver system.” The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). The ICMJE has produced multiple editions of their Uniform Requirements, and the 2007 and later editions refer to the detailed style guide from the National Library of Medicine, Citing Medicine, which should be considered as “authoritative” for citation formats. However, these rules have been adapted by individual institutions and publishers to meet their needs, so there really is no one current Vancouver style for references.

The Vancouver style consists of the following elements:

In-text citations in the body of the paper.
A numbered reference list at the end of the paper giving the details of each source referred to.

Definitions of all non-legal citation elements in this guide, even though they are not in quotation marks, are taken directly from Citing Medicine.

Additional resources

The following resources provide guides for citing in the Vancouver style.

Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals
Citing Medicine : The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers. 2nd ed. Bethesda (MD): National Library of Medicine (US); 2007
A comprehensive source of examples of citing material on the Internet, published and un-published print material, and much more!
American Medical Association Manual of Style: a Guide for Authors and Editors. 10th ed. New York: Oxford University Press; 2007.

Vancouver reference generator

Reference generator
The Vancouver Reference Generator will automatically create and format your citations in the Vancouver Referencing style. Simply enter the details of the source you wish to cite and the generator will do the hard work for you, no registration is required!