Vancouver system

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Vancouver system, also known as Vancouver reference style or the author-number
system, is a citation style. It is popular in the physical sciences, and is one of two referencing
systems normally used in medicine, the other being the author-date, or "Harvard", system.[1][2]
Hundreds of scientific journals use author-number systems, which have existed for over a
century. They all follow the same essential logic, although the trivial details of the output
mask, such as punctuation, casing of titles, and italic, vary widely among them. The names
"Vancouver system" or "Vancouver style" have existed since 1978. They have two sensesa
broad sense meaning any author-date system (regardless of the trivial output mask details),
and a narrow sense referring to the specific author-date incarnation used by the ICMJE
Recommendations (Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts). The latest version of the latter is
Citing Medicine, per the References > Style and Format section of the ICMJE
Recommendations.[3] Citing Medicine style is the style used by MEDLINE and PubMed;[4]
thus, the output mask seen at PubMed is "Vancouver style" in its specific/narrow sense.
As an example of the two senses, AMA reference style is Vancouver style in the broad sense
of the term (because it is an author-number system that conforms to the URMs), but not in the
narrow sense (because it has trivial output mask differences from NLM/PubMed style). The
latter is why the output styles (masks) of reference management software offer a distinction
between Vancouver or AMA.

Contents

1 History

2 Sample usage
o 2.1 Labelling citations
o 2.2 Format of citations

2.2.1 Journal articles

2.2.2 Books

2.2.3 Electronic material

3 References

4 External links

History

Author-number systems have existed for over a century and throughout that time have been
one of the main types of citation style in scientific journals (the other being author-date). In
1978, a committee of editors from various medical journals, the International Committee of
Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), met in Vancouver, BC, Canada to agree to a unified set of
requirements for the articles of such journals. This meeting led to the establishment of the
Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (URMs). Part of
the URMs is the reference style, for which the ICMJE selected the long-established authornumber principle.
The URMs were developed 15 years before the World Wide Web debuted. During those
years, they were published as articles or supplements in various ICMJE member journals.
These included the 1991 BMJ publication,[5] the 1995 CMAJ publication[6] and the 1997
Annals of Internal Medicine publication.[7] In the late 1990s and early 2000s, journals were
asked to cite the 1997 JAMA version[8] when reprinting the Uniform requirements.
In the early 2000s, with the Web having become a major force in academic life, the idea
gradually took hold that the logical home for the latest edition of the URMs would be the
ICMJE website itself (as opposed to whichever journal article or supplement had most
recently published an update). For example, as of 2004, the editors of Haematologica decided
simply to invite their authors to visit www.icmje.org for the 2003 revision of the Uniform
requirements.[9]
Since the early to mid-2000s, the United States National Library of Medicine (which runs
MEDLINE and PubMed) has hosted the ICMJE's "Sample References" pages.[10] Around
2007, the NLM created Citing Medicine, its style guide for citation style, as a new home for
the style's details. The ICMJE Recommendations now point to Citing Medicine as the home
for the formatting details of Vancouver style.[3] For example, in the December 2013 edition of
the ICMJE Recommendations, the relevant paragraph is IV.A.3.g.ii. (References > Style and
Format).[3]

Sample usage
Labelling citations
References are numbered consecutively in order of appearance in the text they are
identified by Arabic numerals in parentheses (1), square brackets [1], superscript1, or a
combination[1].

Format of citations
Different formats exist for different types of sources, e.g. books, journal articles etc. Author
names are abbreviated to at most two initials.[11] Although Citing Medicine does not explicitly
mandate merging initials (e.g. "R. K." would be merged into "RK"), the examples used
throughout the book do.
Journal articles
Standard journal articles

Leurs R, Church MK, Taglialatela M. H1-antihistamines: inverse agonism, antiinflammatory actions and cardiac effects. Clin Exp Allergy. 2002 Apr;32(4):489-98.

Tashiro J, Yamaguchi S, Ishii T, Suzuki A, Kondo H, Morita Y, Hara K, Koyama I.

Inferior oncological prognosis of surgery without oral chemotherapy for stage III
colon cancer in clinical settings. World J Surg Oncol. 2014 May 10;12(1):145. [Epub
ahead of print]

As an option, if a journal carries continuous pagination throughout a volume (as many

medical journals do), the month and issue number may be omitted.

Thomas MC. Diuretics, ACE inhibitors and NSAIDs the triple whammy. Med J
Aust. 2000;172:184-5.

The NLM lists all authors for all articles, because it is appropriate for capturing all authors
and all of their publications in the MEDLINE database to be found by searches. However, in
the reference lists of articles, most journals truncate the list after 3 or 6 names, followed by
"et al." (which most medical journals do not italicize):

Guilbert TW, Morgan WJ, Zeiger RS, Mauger DT, Boehmer SJ, Szefler SJ, et al.
Long-term inhaled corticosteroids in preschool children at high risk for asthma. N
Engl J Med. 2006 May 11;354(19):1985-97.

Optionally, a unique identifier (such as the article's DOI or PMID) may be added to the
citation:

von Itzstein M, Wu WY, Kok GB, Pegg MS, Dyason JC, Jin B, et al. Rational design
of potent sialidase-based inhibitors of influenza virus replication. Nature. 1993 Jun
3;363(6428):418-23. PMID 8502295.

NLM elides ending page numbers and uses a hyphen as the range indicating character (1845). Many journals do likewise, whereas others expand the ending page numbers in full (184185), use an en dash instead of a hyphen (1845), or both (184185).
Virtually all medical journal articles are published online. Many are published online only,
and many others are published online ahead of print. For the date of online publication, at the
end of the citation NLM puts "[Epub Year Mon Day]" (for online-only publication) or "[Epub
ahead of print]" for online ahead of print (with the month and day following the year in its
normal position). In contrast, AMA style puts "[published online Month Day, Year]" at the
end of the article title. It no longer uses the term "Epub" and no longer includes the words
"ahead of print". It omits the year from its normal location after the journal title abbreviation
if there is no print data to give (online-only publication).
The titles of journals are abbreviated. There are no periods in the abbreviation. A period
comes after the abbreviation, delimiting it from the next field. The abbreviations are
standardized. The standardization was formerly incomplete and internal to organizations such
as NLM. It is now formalized at the supraorganizational level by documents including Citing
Medicine at Appendix A: Abbreviations for Commonly Used English Words in Journal Titles,

ISO 4: Information and documentation -- Rules for the abbreviation of title words and titles
of publications, and the ISSN.org List of Title Word Abbreviations (LTWA).
Articles not in English
As per journal articles in English:

Forneau E, Bovet D. Recherches sur l'action sympathicolytique d'un nouveau driv

du dioxane. Arch Int Pharmacodyn. 1933;46:178-91. French.

The NLM adds an English translation of the title enclosed in square brackets right after the
title. The language is specified in full after the location (pagination), followed by a period.
Books
Personal author(s)

Rang HP, Dale MM, Ritter JM, Moore PK. Pharmacology. 5th ed. Edinburgh:
Churchill Livingstone; 2003.

Editor(s) or compiler(s) as authors

Beers MH, Porter RS, Jones TV, Kaplan JL, Berkwits M, editors. The Merck manual
of diagnosis and therapy. 18th ed. Whitehouse Station (NJ): Merck Research
Laboratories; 2006.

Authored chapter in edited publication

Glennon RA, Dukat M. Serotonin receptors and drugs affecting serotonergic

neurotransmission. In: Williams DA, Lemke TL, editors. Foye's principles of
medicinal chemistry. 5th ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 2002.

Electronic material
Website

Drug-interactions.com [homepage on the Internet]. Indianapolis: Indiana University

Department of Medicine; 2003 [updated 17 May 2006; cited 30 May 2006]. Available
from: http://medicine.iupui.edu/flockhart/

References
1.
2.

Reference styles: Harvard and Vancouver [Retrieved 2013-03-01].

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Uniform
Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Sample References,
United States National Library of Medicine, retrieved 2013-03-01

3.

ICMJE, Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and

Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.

4.

Patrias, Karen, Wendling, Dan, ed., Citing Medicine: The NLM Style Guide
for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, Bethesda, Maryland, USA: United States
National Library of Medicine.

5.

Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals.

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. BMJ (Clinical research ed.).
1991;302(6772):33841. doi:10.1136/bmj.302.6772.338. PMID 2001512.

6.

Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals.

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Canadian Medical Association
Journal. 1995;152(9):145973. PMID 7728695.

7.

Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals.

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors [Free full text]. Annals of
Internal Medicine. 1997;126(1):3647. PMID 8992922.

8.

Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals.

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. JAMA: the journal of the
American Medical Association. 1997;277(11):92734. doi:10.1001/jama.277.11.927.
PMID 9062335.

9.

International Committee Of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Uniform

Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: writing and editing
for biomedical publication [Free full text]. Haematologica. 2004;89(3):264. PMID
15020262.

10.

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Uniform Requirements

for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Sample References [Retrieved
2006 Dec 24].

11.

Patrias, K. In: Wendling, D., editor. Citing Medicine: The NLM Style Guide
for Authors, Editors, and Publishers [Internet]. 2nd ed. Bethesda, MD: National
Library of Medicine (US); 2007 [Retrieved 2012 February 22]. "Convert given (first)
names and middle names to initials, for a maximum of two initials following each
surname"