How to format your references using the The New England Journal of Medicine citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Download the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

Ozbay E. Plasmonics: merging photonics and electronics at nanoscale dimensions. Science 2006;311(5758):189–93.

A journal article with 2 authors

Marks CO, Muller-Landau HC. Comment on “From plant traits to plant communities: a statistical mechanistic approach to biodiversity.” Science 2007;316(5830):1425; author reply 1425.

A journal article with 3 authors

Overby CL, Hripcsak G, Shen Y. Estimating heritability of drug-induced liver injury from common variants and implications for future study designs. Sci Rep 2014;4:5762.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Silveira JR, Raymond GJ, Hughson AG, et al. The most infectious prion protein particles. Nature 2005;437(7056):257–61.

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Lemma A. Introduction to the Practice of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2008.

An edited book

Zhong Z, editor. Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Engineering and Applications (IEA) 2012: Volume 3. London: Springer; 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

Bhasker J, Chadha R. Interconnect Parasitics. In: Bhasker J, editor. Static Timing Analysis for Nanometer Designs: A Practical Approach. Boston, MA: Springer US; 2009. p. 101–21.

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for The New England Journal of Medicine.

Blog post

Andrew E. Mars: Contamination, Planetary Protection And The Search For Life [Internet]. IFLScience. 2015 [cited 2018 Oct 30];Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/space/mars-contamination-planetary-protection-and-search-life/

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office. Cost Information on the Desegregation of the School Systems in Mobile County and Wilcox County, Alabama. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1972.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Konzem SR. Tenability and Computability of Generalized Pólya Urns. 2017;

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Joy S. Bags That Don’t Brag. New York Times. 2014;E17.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

This sentence cites one reference ¹.
This sentence cites two references ^1,2.
This sentence cites four references ^1–4.

About the journal

Full journal title	The New England Journal of Medicine
Abbreviation	N. Engl. J. Med.
ISSN (print)	0028-4793
ISSN (online)	1533-4406
Scope	General Medicine