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Need an AMA citation? Our free AMA citation generator builds accurate American Medical Association references in seconds. Paste a DOI, PMID, URL, or ISBN, or enter the details manually, and get a properly formatted AMA reference ready to copy.
AMA style comes from the AMA Manual of Style, 11th edition, and is the standard across medicine and the health sciences — in JAMA and many other medical journals, in nursing and pharmacy programmes, and in most clinical coursework.
AMA is a numbered system. The first source you cite is 1, the next is 2, and the number appears in the text as a superscript with no brackets and no spaces — the finding has been replicated twice.¹ Later mentions of that source reuse its original number, and the reference list is printed in numeric order rather than alphabetically.
Superscripts sit outside commas and periods but inside colons and semicolons. To cite several sources at once, use a comma with no space between numbers,¹,³ and use a hyphen for a run of three or more.¹⁻⁴ CiteCreate outputs the plain number so you can paste it anywhere; applying the superscript is a formatting step in your word processor.
The author is written surname then initials with no punctuation between them — Smith JA. The article title is sentence case and unitalicized, the abbreviated journal name is italicized, and the year, volume, issue, and pages run together without spaces. A DOI is appended as doi: with no space.
Example
1. Smith JA. The role of machine learning in academic writing. Journal of Educational Technology. 2023;41(3):215-232. doi:10.1234/jet.2023.0041
In-text: 1
A book entry uses title case for the book title, italicizes it, and separates the publisher from the year with a semicolon. Unlike the journal pattern, no issue or page range follows unless you are citing a specific chapter or page.
Example
1. Smith JA. The Craft of Research. 4th ed. University of Chicago Press; 2020.
In-text: 1
AMA sets a hard limit on author lists: name up to six authors in full, and where there are seven or more, name the first three followed by et al. This is stricter than most styles and is checked in medical journal submissions.
Journal names are abbreviated according to the National Library of Medicine's list — the same abbreviations you see in PubMed, where the New England Journal of Medicine is N Engl J Med. Because PubMed carries both the abbreviation and the full metadata, pasting a PMID or DOI into the generator is the most reliable route to a correct AMA reference.
AMA punctuation is compressed, and most errors are extra characters that other styles taught you to add.
Yes. In-text citations are superscript numbers, assigned in the order sources are first cited, with no brackets and no space before them. The reference list follows the same numeric order.
List up to six authors in full. With seven or more, list the first three followed by et al. — this is one of the rules medical journals check most closely.
Use the National Library of Medicine journal abbreviation shown in PubMed — for example, N Engl J Med. Pasting a PMID or DOI into the generator pulls the correct metadata directly.
The 11th edition, published in 2020, is current. If a syllabus still specifies the 10th, the everyday journal and book patterns are close enough that a correctly built reference needs little or no adjustment.
Yes. AMA references, BibTeX, and RIS export are free with no sign-up required.