Public Health

Guidelines For Citing References Within Text

• Cite references in consecutive order using superscript numbers.
• Superscript numbers are placed outside periods and commas, and inside colons and semicolons.
• Corresponding references should be listed in numeric order at the end of the document.
• Unpublished works and personal communications should be cited parenthetically (and are not included in the reference list).

Reference List

• Reference list should be in numberical order, corresponding to the in-text citation numbers.

For Journal Articles

• Authors' last names and initials.
  • The names of all authors should be given unless there are more than 6, in which case the names of the first 3 authors are used followed by “et al.”
  • Example: Smith J, Doe M, Brown A.
• Journal titles are written in sentence case, meaning use capitalization as if it was a sentence.

  • Journal titles should be abbreviated and italized. Abbreviations can be found in PubMed. 

  • Example: New England Journal of Medicine is abbreviated N Engl J Med

• Year (or online publication date [month, day, year] if article is published online first and has yet to appear in a paginated issue or is published in an online-only journal)
• Volume number Issue number
• Part or supplement number, when pertinent
• Page numbers (or e-locator if electronic or pre-published)
• DOI (Electronic articles only)
• URL (Electronic articles only; if DOI not present)
• Accessed date (Electronic articles only; if DOI not present)

Example of Journal Article

Yasuhara S, Alston TA. After a heart attack, who should care. Crit Care Med. 2022;50(6):1030-1032. doi:10.1097/CCM.0000000000005477