AMA Citation Guide

Getting Started with In-Text Citations

In AMA Style documents, in-text citations are identified via superscript numbers (example¹).

Citation Basics

If you cite something in your paper or article, it must be in the reference list. If you’re citing a table, figure, or box, ^1 and they appear in with your text, you will add them to the appropriate space in the reference list, as if they were just in line with the text. You should also put the citation outside of periods and commas, but inside colons and semicolons.¹

If you are citing something with numbers, try to add in another word to prevent the citation from looking like an exponent¹. Fischer and Frank¹ gave the example of:

The 2 largest studies to date included 26 patients² and 18 patients.³

If you are citing multiple sources at a given place, then you can separate the superscript citations with a comma¹:

The 2 largest studies^2,3 to date included 26 and 18 patients, respectively.

Authors

When writing authors names in the body of your text, stick with just their last names. If there are just two authors, you can use both of their last names, but if there are more than 2, just write the primary author’s name and et al. Fischer and Frank¹ also specify that you are not to change et al to a possessive version (et al’s), but rather, should edit the sentence so that there is no longer a need for a possessive.

If the author of a work is named as “Anonymous,” this title takes the place of the author’s name in the citation. If there is no author listed on a work, then you would just leave off the author’s portion of a citation.