AMA Citation Format: In-Text Citations, Reference Examples and LaTeX

An AMA citation is a superscript number in the text that points to a numbered entry in the reference list. The number is assigned the first time a source is cited and never changes, so a reader can glance from the text to the list without hunting for an author name or a year.

This page covers the rules from the AMA Manual of Style, 11th edition (2020): where the superscripts go, how the reference list is built, a worked example for each common source type, how AMA differs from APA and Vancouver, and two tested ways to produce AMA citations in LaTeX.

What Is AMA Citation Style?

AMA style is the house style of the American Medical Association, published as the AMA Manual of Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors. The 11th edition is the current one. It is the required style for the JAMA Network journals (JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Pediatrics and the rest) and for many other US medical, nursing, pharmacy and public health journals, and it is the style medical and health science students are often asked to use for coursework.

Three things distinguish it from the author-date styles used in the social sciences:

• Citation-order numbering. Sources are numbered 1, 2, 3 in the order they are first cited, and the reference list is in that order, not alphabetical.
• Superscript in-text numerals. The citation is a small raised number, not a parenthetical name and year.
• Compact references. Authors are written as surname plus initials without periods, journal titles are abbreviated the way the National Library of Medicine abbreviates them, and the year, volume, issue and pages are run together without spaces.

AMA In-Text Citation Rules

Every in-text AMA citation is a superscript Arabic numeral. The rules that govern it:

1. Number in order of first appearance. The first source you cite is 1, the second is 2, and so on through the paper. Tables and figures count: a source first cited in a table takes its number from where the table is first mentioned in the text.
2. Reuse the number. If you cite source 3 again on page 9, it is still 3. Never give one source two numbers.
3. Place it after periods and commas, before colons and semicolons. The numeral sits outside a closing period or comma and inside a colon or semicolon.
4. Separate multiple citations with commas and no spaces, and collapse three or more consecutive numbers into a range with a hyphen: ^2,5,7 or ^2-4, not ^{2, 3, 4}.
5. Put the number right after an author name when the author is named in the sentence, and write et al without a period: "Okafor et al¹ reported…"
6. Cite a page as ^4(p211) when you quote or point to a specific place in a long source.

Here is a paragraph that uses all of these:

Statin therapy lowers the rate of major cardiovascular events in adults older than 75 years.¹ Dose adjustment for reduced renal clearance is covered in standard pharmacology references,^2,3 and current blood pressure targets for this age group are published online.⁴ Chronic kidney disease now affects roughly one in seven adults⁵; the pooled analysis¹ did not stratify by kidney function. Harrow and Vance^2(p188) give the dosing table.

Note the semicolon case: the ⁵ goes before the semicolon, while the ¹ and ⁴ go after their periods. Source 1 keeps its number on the second use.

AMA Reference Format: The Reference List

The list is titled References, placed at the end of the paper, and numbered with Arabic numerals followed by a period, in citation order. The AMA reference format for a journal article, which is the pattern every other source type is a variation of, is:

Author AA, Author BB, Author CC. Title of article in sentence case. J Abbrev. Year;Volume(Issue):Pages. doi:10.xxxx/yyyyy

Finding the journal abbreviation is the step people get wrong most often. Search the journal in the NLM Catalog and copy the "NLM Title Abbreviation" field; do not invent one.

AMA Citation Examples by Source Type

Each AMA citation example below is for a fictional source, formatted as it would appear in the reference list. The numbers match the paragraph in the in-text section above.

Things to notice: the book title is in italics and title case while the article and chapter titles are sentence case and roman; the chapter entry puts the editors after "In:" with "eds" and gives the chapter pages after the year with a colon; the website entry names the author or organization first, repeats the site name, and carries both a published date and an accessed date; and no entry ends with a period after a URL or DOI. A journal article with seven or more authors would begin "Okafor AB, Lindqvist M, Santos JP, et al."

AMA vs APA vs Vancouver

AMA is often confused with Vancouver, the numbered style maintained by the National Library of Medicine and the ICMJE, and medical students coming from a psychology or nursing background often have APA habits. The differences that matter:

If you are writing for a journal that says "Vancouver" but gives JAMA-style examples in its author instructions, follow the examples. The two styles are close enough that the instructions, not the label, decide.

AMA Citations in LaTeX

TeX Live ships no AMA style, so an AMA citation in LaTeX takes one extra step. There are two working routes: a community biblatex style that gets close to the manual, and a BibTeX fallback that gets the numbering and author format right.

Option 1: biblatex with the biblatex-ama style

biblatex-ama is not on CTAN. It is a two-file project on GitHub, dli-stats/biblatex-ama, whose citation commands come from the biblatex-ext package. Download ama.bbx and ama.cbx into the folder that holds your .tex file, and style=ama will be found. It needs biblatex-ext and the biber backend, which Octree, Overleaf and every full TeX Live install provide; latexmk -pdf runs biber for you.

Three things to know about the style. Its \cite prints a parenthesized number, (1), so for AMA superscripts use \supercite. Its citation style does not collapse ^1,2,3 into ^1-3; loading the bibliography half on its own (bibstyle=ama) with biblatex-ext's ext-numeric-comp citation style does, at the cost of the two name-format lines that ama.cbx would otherwise supply. And out of the box it prints an en dash in page ranges, a space after the semicolon in the journal line and no DOI. The preamble below handles all of that; with it, the journal article entry comes out exactly as the manual specifies.

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[backend=biber,bibstyle=ama,citestyle=ext-numeric-comp,doi=true,dateabbrev=false,urldate=long]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{refs.bib}

% Name format that ama.cbx would set; needed because citestyle replaces it.
\DeclareNameAlias{default}{family-given}            % Okafor AB, not AB Okafor
\renewcommand*{\revsdnamepunct}{}                   % no comma between surname and initials

% Corrections so the output follows the AMA Manual of Style, 11th ed.
\renewcommand*{\multicitedelim}{\addcomma}            % 2,3 not 2, 3
\AtBeginDocument{\renewcommand*{\bibrangedash}{-}}    % 312-320 not 312–320
\DeclareFieldFormat{doi}{doi:#1}                      % doi:10.xxxx, lowercase, no space
\DefineBibliographyStrings{english}{urlseen={Accessed}}
\renewbibmacro*{journal+issuetitle}{%                 % Year;Vol(Issue):Pages with no spaces
  \usebibmacro{journal}%
  \setunit*{\addperiod\addspace}%
  \usebibmacro{issue+date}%
  \setunit{\addsemicolon}%
  \printfield{volume}%
  \iffieldundef{number}{}{(\printfield{number})}%
  \newunit}

\begin{document}

\section*{Background}
Statin therapy lowers the rate of major cardiovascular events in adults
older than 75 years.\supercite{okafor2024} Dose adjustment for reduced renal
clearance is covered in standard pharmacology references,\supercite{harrow2022,nakamura2022}
and current blood pressure targets for this age group are published
online.\supercite{ridgeline2025} Chronic kidney disease now affects roughly one
in seven adults\supercite{nhdb2025}; the pooled analysis\supercite{okafor2024}
did not stratify by kidney function.

\printbibliography

\end{document}

Write the superscript command directly after the punctuation, years.\supercite{okafor2024}, and the number lands after the period as AMA wants. The matching refs.bib, with the journal abbreviation typed straight into the journal field:

@article{okafor2024,
  author  = {Okafor, Adaeze B. and Lindqvist, Mikael and Santos, Julia P.},
  title   = {Statin therapy and major cardiovascular events in adults aged 75 years and older: a pooled analysis},
  journal = {Northfield J Intern Med},
  year    = {2024},
  volume  = {58},
  number  = {4},
  pages   = {312--320},
  doi     = {10.1000/njim.2024.0412}
}

@book{harrow2022,
  author    = {Harrow, Thomas L. and Vance, Miriam R.},
  title     = {Principles of Clinical Pharmacology in the Elderly},
  edition   = {3},
  publisher = {Brightwater Press},
  year      = {2022}
}

@incollection{nakamura2022,
  author    = {Nakamura, Kenji},
  title     = {Renal dosing of antimicrobials},
  editor    = {Harrow, Thomas L. and Vance, Miriam R.},
  booktitle = {Principles of Clinical Pharmacology in the Elderly},
  edition   = {3},
  publisher = {Brightwater Press},
  year      = {2022},
  pages     = {211--238}
}

@online{ridgeline2025,
  author  = {{Ridgeline Health Institute}},
  title   = {Hypertension management guidelines for adults aged 65 and older},
  date    = {2025-03-04},
  url     = {https://www.ridgelinehealth.example/guidelines/hypertension-65},
  urldate = {2026-10-19}
}

@report{nhdb2025,
  author      = {{National Health Data Bureau}},
  title       = {Chronic Kidney Disease Prevalence Among Adults: 2024 Annual Summary},
  institution = {Department of Public Health},
  year        = {2025},
  number      = {NHDB-25-0117},
  type        = {Report}
}

Compiled, the text reads "75 years.¹ … references,^2,3 … adults⁵; the pooled analysis¹" and the first reference is "Okafor AB, Lindqvist M, Santos JP. Statin therapy … Northfield J Intern Med. 2024;58(4):312-320. doi:10.1000/njim.2024.0412." The double braces around the organization names keep biber from splitting them into given name and surname.

What the style still gets slightly wrong, so you can hand-check before submission: it puts a comma rather than a semicolon between publisher and year in book entries, writes "Ed. by" instead of "In: … eds" for chapters, prefixes the website URL with "url:" and puts the accessed date in parentheses, and ends the DOI with a period. It also sets the web page title in italics and leaves out the site name and the "Published" label. Those are a few minutes of editing in a short reference list.

Option 2: BibTeX with natbib and the vancouver style

If your class or journal template forbids biblatex, the natbib package in super mode gives the superscript numbering, and the vancouver bibliography style (in TeX Live) formats authors as Surname Initials with NLM abbreviations. It is Vancouver, not AMA, so the end page is truncated (312-20), chapters say "editors" and "p. 211-38", and the DOI is not printed; the author list and ordering are right.

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[super,comma,sort&compress]{natbib}
\usepackage{url}   % vancouver.bst wraps URLs in \url

% The style labels entries [1]; AMA wants 1.
\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\@biblabel}[1]{#1.}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

Statin therapy lowers the rate of major cardiovascular events in adults
older than 75 years.\cite{okafor2024} Dose adjustment is covered in standard
references,\cite{harrow2022,nakamura2022} and the pooled analysis\cite{okafor2024}
did not stratify by kidney function.

\bibliographystyle{vancouver}
\bibliography{refs}

\end{document}

comma separates multiple citations with a comma instead of natbib's default semicolon, and sort&compress turns ^2,3,4 into ^2-4. The example cites only the first three entries of refs.bib because BibTeX styles do not know the @online and @report entry types from the biblatex example; for those, use @misc with a howpublished or note field for web pages and @techreport for reports. As a last resort, \bibliographystyle{unsrt} also keeps citation order but prints full first names and "and", which you would have to fix by hand. Avoid the ama.bst file on CTAN: it is a 2002 alpha that prints given names in full and runs the publisher and edition together.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you cite in AMA format?

In the text, put a superscript Arabic numeral at the point you use a source, numbered in the order sources first appear: the first source cited is 1, the second is 2, and a source cited again keeps its original number. The numeral goes after a period or comma and before a colon or semicolon. In the reference list, titled References and ordered by those numbers, each entry gives the authors as Surname Initials (Okafor AB), the article title in sentence case, the NLM-abbreviated journal title in italics, then year;volume(issue):pages and the DOI as doi:10.xxxx/xxxxx.

How many authors do you list in an AMA reference?

List every author when there are six or fewer. When there are seven or more, list the first three followed by et al (no period after al in AMA style). Author names are written as surname followed by initials with no periods and no spaces between the initials, separated by commas, with no "and" before the last name: Okafor AB, Lindqvist M, Santos JP, et al.

What is the difference between AMA and Vancouver citation styles?

Both are numbered styles that order the reference list by first citation and write authors as Surname Initials with NLM journal abbreviations, so they look similar. AMA always uses superscript numerals, lists up to six authors (first three plus et al beyond that), closes a page range in full (312-320), writes the DOI as doi:10.xxxx with no space, and sets journal titles in italics. Vancouver (the NLM/ICMJE style) usually puts numbers in square brackets or parentheses, truncates the end page (312-20), writes "et al." with a period, and does not italicize journal titles. Many journals that say Vancouver accept either.

How do I make AMA citations in LaTeX?

TeX Live has no built-in AMA style. The closest is the community biblatex-ama style: download ama.bbx and ama.cbx from the dli-stats/biblatex-ama repository on GitHub into your project folder, load biblatex with \usepackage[backend=biber,style=ama]{biblatex}, point \addbibresource at your .bib file, cite with \supercite{key} for superscript numbers and print the list with \printbibliography. A few preamble lines fix the page-range dash, the DOI prefix and the spacing in the journal line. If you must use BibTeX, \usepackage[super,comma,sort&compress]{natbib} with \bibliographystyle{vancouver} gives superscript numbering and Surname Initials authors.

Next Steps

The citations are one part of a medical manuscript; these guides cover the rest:

• APA Title Page Format – If your course switches you to APA 7 for the next assignment
• LaTeX Hyperlinks – Make the DOIs and URLs in your reference list clickable with hyperref
• LaTeX Footnotes – Superscript footnote markers, and how to keep them apart from citation numbers
• Sections in LaTeX – Unnumbered headings such as References and Acknowledgments
• LaTeX Templates – Journal article and thesis templates to drop the examples into

Free LaTeX Tools

• LaTeX Preview – Paste the natbib example above and see the PDF without installing TeX
• LaTeX Templates – Article and report templates ready for a bibliography
• LaTeX Symbols Reference – Every symbol you might need in a methods section