CiteTools

AMA Citation Generator

Free AMA citation generator for the 11th edition. Paste a PMID, DOI, ISBN, or reference and copy an AMA reference with the NLM journal abbreviation.

Paste a source to get an AMA reference

AMA citation examples

The same two sources appear on every CiteTools generator page, so you can compare styles side by side.

Journal article

LeCun Y, Bengio Y, Hinton G. Deep learning. Nature. 2015;521(7553):436-444. doi:10.1038/nature14539

Book

Kahneman D. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2011.

AMA in-text citations

Superscript number
1

How AMA formats a reference

  • Each author is a surname followed by initials, with no periods and no comma inside the name: LeCun Y, Bengio Y, Hinton G.
  • Up to six authors are all listed. A work with seven or more shows the first three followed by et al.
  • Article titles use sentence case with no quotation marks, and the word after a colon stays in lower case. Book titles are set in italics and keep a capital on every major word.
  • The journal name is abbreviated the way PubMed abbreviates it, set in italics, and closed with a period: N Engl J Med.
  • Year, volume, issue, and pages run together without spaces, and the page range is written in full: 2015;521(7553):436-444.
  • A DOI closes the reference as doi:10.1038/nature14539 with no period after it. Books give the publisher and the year, with no city.

Who uses AMA style

AMA style comes from the AMA Manual of Style, now in its 11th edition. JAMA and the JAMA Network journals follow it, and so do many other medical, nursing, pharmacy, and public health journals and the degree programs that feed them. Sources are numbered in the order they are first cited, each number appears in the text as a superscript, and the reference list runs in that order. The manual asks for the journal abbreviations of the National Library of Medicine, so a PMID or a DOI gives CiteTools everything the reference needs.

Frequently asked questions

Where does the superscript number go?

After the fact or quotation it supports. The number sits outside periods and commas and inside colons and semicolons. To point at a page, add it yourself in parentheses, as in 1(p438), and set the whole marker as a superscript. Reuse the same number every time you cite that source.

Does AMA want the journal name written in full?

No. AMA uses the abbreviation the National Library of Medicine assigns, without periods: N Engl J Med, not New England Journal of Medicine. A one-word title such as Nature or JAMA stays as it is. CiteTools takes the abbreviation from the library’s catalog when the record carries an ISSN, and keeps the journal name the record gives when the catalog has no match.

Is AMA the same as Vancouver?

No, though both number sources in the order of first citation. AMA sets the journal name in italics, gives the year alone where Vancouver can add the month and day, and writes page ranges in full. From seven authors on, AMA lists three and then et al, and Vancouver lists six.

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