Citing sources in medical & nursing research papers

The following is a guide to citing print and electronic resources for your medical and nursing research. If you have questions, please ask a librarian for assistance.

Medical Research Papers

When publishing an article in a medical journal, you will need to contact the journal publisher and meet their individual style requirements. Most journal publishers provide instructions for authors on their WWW sites. If you have trouble finding a journal's WWW site, ask a librarian for assistance. You may also be able to find publishing requirements in a recent issue of the journal itself. A good resource is the Raymon H. Mulford Library at the University of Toledo Instructions to Authors in the Health Sciences at http://www.mco.edu/lib/instr/libinsta.html. If you are writing a medical research paper for a class, ask the professor which style guide he or she prefers to you use.

Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (Vancouver Style)
Most medical journals utilize the "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals" or "Vancouver Style." This style guide was created by medical journal editors to increase consistency of style between biomedical journals. This style guide is available on-line at http://www.icmje.org/index.html. To see examples of references courtesy of the National Library of Medicine go to the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Sample References at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/uniform_requirements.html. This is the style guide utilized by journals like New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Lancet.

Journal abbreviations
The Uniform Requirements require that the official NLM (National Library of Medicine) Index Medicus journal abbreviations be used in your citations rather than the full journal title. These abbreviations can be found through PubMed at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=journals.
Just type in the full name of the journal, and the Journal Browser will find the official Index Medicus journal abbreviation.

If you are citing a journal which is not indexed in MEDLINE, you can search NLM's Locator Plus for the journal title, and look at its journal abbreviation record. Locator Plus is at http://locatorplus.gov/. (If you need assistance using Locator Plus to find journal abbreviations, please ask a librarian for assistance.)

Examples of journal citations using the Uniform Requirements
It is important to remember that when citing an article retrieved full-text online the format of the citation is handled differently from a typical journal citation:

Nursing Research Papers
APA (American Psychological Association) is a common style guide used for nursing research. However, if you're writing an article for a class, ask your professor which style guide to use. Likewise, if you're writing an article for publication, you will need to determine the author instructions for the specific journal in which you are publishing. Most journal publishers have author instructions listed on their WWW page and/or in recent issues of their journals. (Some publications utilize the "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals" or "Vancouver Style" which is detailed above in Medical Research Papers.)

APA's resource guide for electronic sources is available at http://apastyle.apa.org/ . The Health Sciences Library has a copy of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association in the reference collection under call number: WZ345/.A518p/2001.

Examples of journal citations using APA
It is important to remember that when citing an article retrieved full-text online the format of the citation is handled differently from a typical journal citation.