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AMA Citation Guide

MGH IHP's guide to AMA Style Manual

Purpose of the AMA Citation Guide

As with any formatting style, the AMA Style creates a system for authors to:

  1. Acknowledge the sources of information they use in their works, and
  2. Help their readers retrieve those sources of information

In order to accomplish both of those goals, AMA has a standard way to express citations so that readers know when a source of information is being acknowledge and recognize the parts of the citation so that they may successfully find it for themselves (reference list).

General Format

In AMA Style, authors only include citations on their reference lists if they have cited that work in their papers. In effect there should be a one-to-one correspondence between in-text citations and reference list citations. Every item on the reference list should appear in-text and vice versa.

In-text Citations

Both AMA and NLM use numerical citations, but AMA uses superscript numbers (e.g. 1,2) to identified cited information for in-text citations.

Reference Lists

“In the reference list, use the author’s surname followed by initials without periods” (1 Fischer & Frank, 2020). The entire list is arranged in numerical order, based on the order of appearance in the manuscript. We’ll go into more detail about the Reference Lists later.

AMA Quick Reference

  Journal Articles Books Websites
Print Author(s). Article title. Abbreviated Journal Name. Year;vol(issue No.):inclusive pages. DOI, if provided. Author(s). Book Title. Edition number (if it’s the second edition or later). Publisher’s name; copyright year.  
Online Author(s). Article title. Abbreviated Journal Name. Publication date. DOI, if provided Author(s). Book Title. Edition number (if it’s the second edition or later). Publisher’s name; copyright year. Accessed [date]. URL (or DOI, if provided) Author (or, if no author is available, the name of the organization responsible for the site). Title (or if no title is available, the name of the organization responsible for the site). Name of the website. Published [date]. Updated [date]. Access [date]. URL