Vancouver Citation Generator

Create Vancouver (NLM) citations for free. Paste a DOI, ISBN or link, or fill in the form, and get the references entry and the in-text citation formatted to Citing Medicine, 2nd edition. No sign-up, nothing to install.

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    DOI, ISBN, PubMed, arXiv, YouTube or any web page. The details come from Crossref, Open Library, NCBI and the page itself.

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    10,863 styles

    The official Citation Style Language files, the same ones Zotero and Mendeley use, plus a dedicated AGLC4 engine.

    Vancouver rules students get wrong

    Vancouver (NLM), Citing Medicine, 2nd edition. Used in: Medicine, dentistry and the health sciences, following the ICMJE recommendations.

    • Sources are numbered in the order they are first cited.
    • List up to six authors, then "et al."; names are family name and initials without full stops: LeCun Y.
    • Journal titles use the NLM abbreviation: Nature, N Engl J Med.
    • No italics and minimal punctuation.

    Vancouver examples for every source

    Each example below was formatted by this generator, so it is exactly what you will get.

    Journal article

    References entry

    1. LeCun Y, Bengio Y, Hinton G. Deep learning. Nature. 2015 May 28;521(7553):436-44. doi:10.1038/nature14539

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Book

    References entry

    1. Kahneman D. Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2011.

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Chapter in an edited book

    References entry

    1. Tversky A, Kahneman D. Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. In: Kahneman D, Slovic P, Tversky A, editors. Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1982. p. 3-20.

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Web page

    References entry

    1. World Health Organization. World Health Organization [Internet]. 2023 [cited 2026 Sep 28]. Depression. Available from: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/depression

    In-text citation

    (1)
    YouTube video

    References entry

    1. 3Blue1Brown. But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 1 [Internet]. YouTube; 2017 [cited 2026 Sep 28]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Podcast episode

    References entry

    1. Glass I. Amusement park. This American Life [Internet]. WBEZ Chicago; 2011. Available from: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/443/amusement-park

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Lecture or speech

    References entry

    1. Pausch R. Really achieving your childhood dreams [Lecture] [Internet]. Lecture presented at: Journeys Lecture Series. 2007 Sep 18; Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Newspaper article

    References entry

    1. Roose K. A conversation with Bing’s chatbot left me deeply unsettled. The New York Times [Internet]. 2023 Feb 16. Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Magazine article

    References entry

    1. Carr N. Is Google making us stupid? The Atlantic. 2008 Jul;302(1):56-63.

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Report

    References entry

    1. World Health Organization. World mental health report: Transforming mental health for all [Internet]. World Health Organization; 2022. Available from: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240049338

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Thesis or dissertation

    References entry

    1. Nash JF. Non-cooperative games [dissertation]. Princeton University; 1950.

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Conference paper

    References entry

    1. Vaswani A, Shazeer N, Parmar N, Uszkoreit J, Jones L, Gomez AN, et al. Attention is all you need. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. Curran Associates; 2017. p. 5998-6008.

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Dataset

    References entry

    1. Fisher RA. Iris. UCI Machine Learning Repository; 1988. doi:10.24432/C56C76

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Film

    References entry

    1. Inception. Warner Bros. Pictures; 2010.

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Software or app

    References entry

    1. R Core Team. R: A language and environment for statistical computing [Internet]. R Foundation for Statistical Computing; 2023. Available from: https://www.R-project.org/

    In-text citation

    (1)
    ChatGPT or other AI

    References entry

    1. OpenAI. ChatGPT [Large language model] [Internet]. Mar 14 version. 2023. Available from: https://chat.openai.com/chat

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Dictionary or encyclopedia entry

    References entry

    1. Merriam-Webster. Culture. In: Merriam-Webster.com dictionary [Internet]. [cited 2026 Sep 28]. Available from: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Preprint (arXiv, SSRN, bioRxiv)

    References entry

    1. Devlin J, Chang MW, Lee K, Toutanova K. BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding [Preprint]. arXiv; 2018. doi:10.48550/arXiv.1810.04805

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Blog post

    References entry

    1. Karpathy A. The unreasonable effectiveness of recurrent neural networks. Andrej Karpathy blog [Internet]. 2015 May 21. Available from: https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Court case

    References entry

    1. Mabo v Queensland (No 2). 175 CLR 1. 1992.

    In-text citation

    (1)
    Legislation

    References entry

    1. Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

    In-text citation

    (1)

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    Questions

    Which edition of Vancouver does this follow?

    Vancouver (NLM): Citing Medicine, 2nd edition, formatted from the nlm-citation-sequence style in the Citation Style Language repository. It is checked against 13 reference examples from Citing Medicine (NLM): 3 match character for character and 10 differ (journal article, book, conference paper, report, thesis or dissertation, web page and newspaper article), so check those source types against the manual.

    Who uses Vancouver?

    Medicine, dentistry and the health sciences, following the ICMJE recommendations.

    Is the Vancouver generator free?

    Yes. No account, no limit, and every export (Word, BibTeX, RIS, CSL-JSON) is included. Your list stays in your browser.

    Where do the details come from when I paste a DOI or link?

    DOIs come from Crossref and DataCite, ISBNs from Open Library and Google Books, PubMed IDs from NCBI, arXiv IDs from arXiv, YouTube links from YouTube, and web pages from the citation metadata the publisher embeds in the page (the same tags Google Scholar reads). Pages that carry no metadata are filled in as far as possible and the gaps are flagged for you.

    Can I export to Word, Zotero, EndNote or LaTeX?

    Yes. Copy the list with its italics into Word or Google Docs, download a formatted .docx, or export BibTeX for LaTeX, RIS for EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley, or CSL-JSON.

    How do I cite a quote from a video or lecture?

    Add the timestamp in the pinpoint box and paste the quote: the generator formats both for your style. To find the exact wording and the time it was said, get the full transcript of the video with timestamps first.

    Citations are formatted by citeproc-js by Frank Bennett (CPAL-1.0, or AGPL-1.0), the engine behind Zotero and Mendeley, running the official Citation Style Language styles (10,863 styles, commit 2e93558) and locales (commit a89adec), used under CC BY-SA 3.0. AGLC4 citations use the LexIntellect AGLC4 engine, checked against the Guide's worked examples. Always check a citation against the manual or your institution's guide before you submit.