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Referencing guide at the University of Manchester: Vancouver

This referencing guide is designed to provide support for all referencing requirements at the University of Manchester

Vancouver Citations within the text

This guide provides you with examples of how to correctly cite references in the Vancouver style within the text of your assignments.

The Vancouver system does allow for some variations in style, but you must remain consistent throughout your document. The Vancouver system is most commonly used in medical and clinical sciences.

Citations you include in the main body of your writing should only provide a number that refers to the reference that you are citing. These citations will then link to a fully detailed reference, which will be included in your list of references / bibliography.

The way in which you refer to a source within the text of your work should always follow this format:

  • The number of the reference appears in brackets outside of the sentence (i.e. after the full stop).
    * This is not the case for many science based journals that include them inside the full stop. Please clarify this with your student handbook or supervisor as to how they would like you to set it out.
  • The number can be in superscript.
  • The number remains the same throughout the paper.
  • Use a hyphen where there are more than 3 consecutive references being referred to.

Vancouver Reference lists/bibliographies

Your reference list links with your in-text citations, enabling readers to easily trace the sources cited within your work. It is a list of the documents from which any direct quotations or examples have been taken.

N.B. A bibliography (where you give credit to sources that were used for background reading, but were not quoted within the body of the text), is not usually required. You should however always check this first, with the person who will be assessing your work.

Your reference list (and bibliography if you choose to provide one) should be arranged numerically in the order that the citations appear in the text.

Multiple authors:

If you have up to six authors for a reference then you list all the authors in your reference list, If you have more than six than six, list the first six authors followed by the term 'et al,' .

Different types of publication require different amounts of information. The Vancouver system lays down standards for the amount of information required for each document type; these are detailed below.

Disclaimer

The information contained within these pages is intended as a general referencing guideline.

Please check with your supervisor to ensure that you are following the specific guidelines required by your school.

Creative Commons Licence This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence.

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