Vancouver Referencing Examples for Every Common Source

The Vancouver system of referencing is the numbered style used in medicine, nursing, dentistry and public health. In the Vancouver system of referencing, sources are cited in the text by number, and the reference list at the end gives the full entry for each number, in the order sources were first cited. The detailed rules for each entry come from the National Library of Medicine's Citing Medicine, 2nd edition, and the ICMJE asks journals to follow NLM's sample references.

Two halves of one system

These Vancouver referencing examples cover the reference list. The numbers in your sentences, including brackets versus superscript, ranges such as (4-6) and page numbers, are covered in our Vancouver in-text citation guide. The two must match: citation (1) in your text is entry 1 in your list.

Let the tool do the formatting

The Vancouver citation generator embedded above builds every Vancouver citation example on this page for you. Paste a DOI, PubMed link, URL or ISBN, check the fields, and copy the numbered entry. Add sources in the order you cite them so the numbers line up.

Every one of these Vancouver referencing examples follows the same pattern: who, what, where, when. In the Vancouver system of referencing, punctuation is fixed and sparse. There are no italics, no quotation marks around titles, and no periods in initials.

Shortened page ranges

Citing Medicine tells you not to repeat page digits that stay the same, so 737-738 becomes 737-8 and 2603-2615 becomes 2603-15. NLM prints a plain hyphen; our engine typesets an en dash (737–8). Either is fine in a student paper.

Titles in sentence case

In each Vancouver citation example, capitalize only the first word of a title, proper nouns and abbreviations: "Safety and efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 vaccine." Keep a subtitle lowercase after the colon, as in the Watson and Crick entry.

The journal article is the most common Vancouver reference style example, because most sources in a health sciences paper are articles. The Citing Medicine journals chapter gives this basic sample: "Petitti DB, Crooks VC, Buckwalter JG, Chiu V. Blood pressure levels before dementia. Arch Neurol. 2005 Jan;62(1):112-6."

How many authors to list

Here Vancouver referencing examples from different guides differ, so check your instructor's preference. Citing Medicine says to "give all authors, regardless of the number," though it allows a limit. The NLM sample references page (NLM itself lists all) says to list the first six authors followed by et al. Most nursing and medical schools use the six-author rule, and so does our engine, as the Polack entry shows. If your instructor wants every name, add the rest by hand.

Articles with a DOI

In a Vancouver reference style example with a DOI (digital object identifier), the DOI goes at the end of the entry. Our engine writes doi:10.1038/171737a0; NLM's samples put a space after the colon. Some programs also want a PubMed ID (PMID) after the DOI. If you read an article only online and it has no DOI, add [Internet] after the journal title, a [cited] date, and "Available from:" with the URL.

Journal abbreviations and the NLM Catalog

Vancouver uses the abbreviations from MEDLINE, which you can look up in the NLM Catalog. Search the full title and copy the "NLM Title Abbreviation." Examples: N Engl J Med for the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA for the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Arch Neurol for Archives of Neurology. One-word titles such as Nature and Lancet stay as they are. The abbreviation has no periods.

A Vancouver citation example for a book follows a simple pattern: Author(s). Title. Edition. Place of publication: Publisher; Year. The edition is written as "4th ed." and left out for a first edition.

A whole book

Example 3 above, Murray and colleagues' Medical Microbiology, is the NLM sample for a book with personal authors. If a US city might be unfamiliar, Citing Medicine adds the state in parentheses with its two-letter code, as in "Mount Pleasant (MI)."

A chapter in an edited book

In a Vancouver reference style example for a chapter, the chapter's authors and title come first, then "In:" and the book's editors, followed by the word "editors." The book's title and publication details follow, and the entry ends with the chapter's pages after "p.", as in example 4. That chapter is NLM's own sample, from The Genetic Basis of Human Cancer, edited by Bert Vogelstein and Kenneth Kinzler.

Editors with no chapter

For an example of Vancouver style citation of a whole edited book, put the editors in the author position and add "editors" after their names: Vogelstein B, Kinzler KW, editors. The genetic basis of human cancer. New York: McGraw-Hill; 2002.

Online sources and reports from health agencies show up in almost every nursing paper. Here's an example of Vancouver style citation for each, with the rules behind them.

Websites

An example of Vancouver style citation for a web page needs three extra pieces: "[Internet]" after the site name, the date you read it in brackets after "cited," and "Available from:" before the URL. Example 5 is our engine's version for the CDC's "About Sleep" page. Citing Medicine's full template for part of a website also gives the place and publisher after the site name, such as "Atlanta (GA): Centers for Disease Control and Prevention"; add them if your instructor follows the manual closely. Don't put a period after the URL.

WHO, CDC and other agency reports

When an organization writes a report, it goes in the author position in Vancouver referencing examples, as in example 6. If you read the report online, add [Internet] after the title, a [cited] date and the URL. If it has a report number, such as a CDC MMWR issue or a WHO document code, include it before the URL.

These two Vancouver referencing examples are less common in undergraduate papers, but graduate students and capstone projects use them often.

Theses and dissertations

Add "[dissertation]" or "[master's thesis]" right after the title, then the place, the university and the year, as in example 7, NLM's own sample. Our engine wraps the place in square brackets, a form Citing Medicine uses when the place doesn't appear on the document; we removed them to match NLM's sample.

Conference papers

A Vancouver citation example for a paper in published proceedings reads like a book chapter: the paper's authors and title, "In:" and the editors, the proceedings title, then the conference date and place, the publisher and the pages. Example 8 follows NLM's sample, which prints the conference place as "Kinsdale, Ireland," exactly as we copied it; the town is usually spelled Kinsale. Our engine left out the conference date and place, so we added them by hand.

Here's how these Vancouver referencing examples fit together at the end of a short paper, such as an invented paper on sleep and infection control for a NURS 3300 course. The numbers follow the order in which the paper first cites each source.

Layout of the page

Start the list on a new page titled References. Put each number flush left, followed by a period and the entry.

What the text looks like

In the paper, the first citation of Watson and Crick is (1), the vaccine trial is (2), and so on. The Vancouver in-text citation guide shows how to cite several at once and where to put the number against punctuation.

These are the errors instructors mark most often when students copy Vancouver referencing examples into a reference list, with the fix for each.

The Vancouver referencing examples on this page follow two NLM sources. Citing Medicine's journals chapter covers authors, titles, dates and page ranges in detail. The NLM sample references page gives short models for more than 40 source types, including the chapter, dissertation and conference paper used here.

When your school's guide differs

University guides, such as those at Monash and Queensland, sometimes change small details: a space after the colon in "doi:", the number of authors before et al., or line spacing. Your instructor's guide always wins.

AMA and other numbered styles

AMA style, used by many US medical schools and journals, is a close cousin of Vancouver with italic journal titles and superscript citations. The AMA citation generator formats the same sources in that style. For engineering papers, the IEEE reference format guide covers bracketed numbers, and the APA format guidelines guide covers author-date papers in psychology and nursing.

Next steps

Build your own list with the free Vancouver citation generator, then compare each entry with the matching Vancouver reference style example above. Every guide we publish is listed on the student writing guides page.