AMA Style Guide: Citations, Reference, and General Formatting Guidelines

Knowledge-sharing and collaboration is no longer restricted to only the scientific community. A lot of lay people and non-specialists are interested in verified research works, especially in the medicine and health-related fields. And why should they not be? Any medicine-related investigation has real-world effect, and people are always curious about it. So, having an authoritative format for writing research papers and citing sources is useful. It simplifies the review process for journals while simultaneously attracting lay readers.  

Among the various style guides, here’s one that’s less talked about. 

What is AMA Style Guide?

AMA Style Guide General Formatting Rules

AMA Citation Style

AMA Reference List Formatting

What is AMA Style Guide?

If you want to publish in any journal under The American Medical Association (AMA), the AMA style guide is your go-to source for writing and formatting research papers. Popularly used in the fields of Medicine and Health Sciences, the AMA style guide lets students, researchers, and professionals in health-related fields to communicate their work effectively. This style guide has evolved over the years and is currently in its 11th edition [1]. You will see that it provides guidelines on page layout, citation and reference formatting, figure and table preparation, and clinical trial registration and reporting among other things. This guideline is necessary to 

• ensure uniformity in how a study is presented,  
• attribute your research ideas to accurate sources, 
• make is easy for readers to verify sources, and 
• depict biological data, drug mechanisms, and other anatomical details with scientific accuracy. 

AMA Style Guide General Formatting Rules

Let’s first understand the general rules for formatting under AMA, which are quite lenient! What they ask for is consistency and not much else. So, keep these pointers in mind: 

• Use an easily readable font like Times New Roman (12 pt) 
• Keep double line spacing throughout the manuscript: the title page, abstract, manuscript body, and reference list 
• A one-inch page margin is recommended on all sides 
• Let the first line of all paragraphs be indented 
• Use clear headings for all sections (abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusions, references); write them in bold and align them on the left side of the page 
• Write the abstract within 150 to 250 words; don’t include citations but provide an overview of the study’s objective, methods, key findings, and conclusions. 
• If the journal asks for a separate Title Page, include the following information in order: 
  • research paper title (centered and written in bold), 
  • running head (shortened title of 40 or less characters), 
  • names of contributing authors, 
  • highest educational degrees of authors, 
  • contact information (e.g., e-mail addresses), and 
  • institutional affiliations. 

AMA Citation Style

In terms of citing sources, AMA recommends the simplest format of all:  superscript numbers (like this4). The citations should be placed as close to the information from the source as possible in a sentence. For example, you can place it after the author’s name of after a quotation from the source. See below example: 

“Darwin’s theory of evolution⁴ is based on the principle of survival of the fittest…” 

Basically, the superscript number should clearly indicate the part of the source you want to highlight for the readers to refer to. Also, write the citations after a punctuation mark like a comma, semicolon, or period. 

What if you’ve to cite multiple sources? AMA allows you to use “en dash” to indicate a range of sources; inconsecutive sources must be separated by commas. Don’t keep any space between the numbers. Example below: 

Here’s how you cite multiple sources in AMA^2–5,9,12 

Every source you cite should have a corresponding entry under the reference list at the end of the manuscript. But how do you format the reference list? Let’s see what AMA guidelines say. 

AMA Reference List Formatting

The reference list should be placed on a separate page at the end of your manuscript. Write the heading “References” in bold and start listing the works you have cited in the main text in the order of their appearance. Each work should be mentioned in the list only once; if you need to repeat the citation, use the same number again. 

Before we look at specific formats for different types of sources, here are some general rules to note: 

• Journal titles are abbreviated in the reference list entry 
• When writing the authors’ names, the surname is followed by the initials (no period separates the initials) 
• You can list up to 6 authors. If a work has more than 6 authors, mention the names of the first 3 authors followed by “et al.” 

The table below shows the format for common reference types in AMA. 

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Reference

1. AMA Manual of Stylehttps://academic.oup.com/amamanualofstyle