AMA style — used by JAMA Network journals and most medicine, nursing, and health-science programs — is a variation of Vancouver style, which means it shares the same numbered backbone but adds its own specific rules on top. Here's exactly how the numbering and reference-list formatting work, and what a citation generator can and can't do for you.
Trusted by students at
AMA style cites sources with superscript Arabic numerals, numbered consecutively in the order they first appear in your text, tables, or figures — the same source keeps the same number every time you cite it again. Where that number sits relative to punctuation is a specific AMA rule: it goes after periods and commas, but before colons and semicolons. Citing more than one source at the same point, you separate the numbers with a comma and no space; for more than two consecutive numbers in a row, you join the first and last with a hyphen instead of listing every one.
Naming an author in your sentence follows its own rule too: use last names only, always paired with the number. One or two authors, name both ("Lee and Patel⁷ found..."). Three or more, use the first author's surname plus "et al" ("Nguyen et al⁸ reported..."). If you're citing a source you only read about secondhand, through another paper, name the original author in your text and cite the original directly if you can get hold of it — your reference list should only include what you actually read.
Author names are listed last name first, followed by initials with no periods or spaces between them, and no "and" between multiple authors' names — just commas. For seven or more authors, list the first three names and then "et al." The article title is capitalized sentence-style (only the first word, not every major word), which trips people up coming from APA or MLA's title-case habits.
The journal title gets abbreviated and italicized, using the abbreviation conventions from the AMA Manual of Style (section 13.10) or the NLM's List of Title Word Abbreviations — so "Journal" becomes "J," "American" becomes "Am," and so on. Getting this wrong is one of the most common AMA formatting slips, since it's not something you'd intuit from the journal's actual printed name.
Because AMA is explicitly a variation of Vancouver style, the core mechanics overlap: both use numbered in-text citations assigned by order of first appearance, with a correspondingly numbered reference list. StudyPilot's citation generator currently formats Vancouver style directly, which gets you most of the structural heavy lifting — consistent numbering, correctly ordered author names — in the same shape AMA requires.
What it won't do automatically is AMA's specific details on top of that shared structure: the exact superscript placement rules around punctuation, the no-period author-initial formatting, and journal-title abbreviation against the AMA Manual of Style's own list. For a paper actually being submitted to a JAMA Network journal or graded against AMA style specifically, generate your numbered reference list, then do a final pass against those three details before calling it done.
Generate a numbered Vancouver-style reference list in seconds, then do a quick AMA-specific pass for punctuation placement and journal abbreviations.
Generate Citations Free →