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

Davies P. A quantum recipe for life. Nature 2005;437(7060):819.

A journal article with 2 authors

Sunami A, Kurokawa K. Recession Watch: No time for nationalism. Nature 2009;457(7232):960–1.

A journal article with 3 authors

Chevrier V, Poulet F, Bibring J-P. Early geochemical environment of Mars as determined from thermodynamics of phyllosilicates. Nature 2007;448(7149):60–3.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Klein EM, Smith DK, Williams CM, Schouten H. Counter-rotating microplates at the Galapagos triple junction. Nature 2005;433(7028):855–8.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Vignes A. Extractive Metallurgy 2. Hoboken, NJ USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2013.

An edited book

Comin M, Käll L, Marchiori E, Ngom A, Rajapakse J, editors. Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics: 9th IAPR International Conference, PRIB 2014, Stockholm, Sweden, August 21-23, 2014. Proceedings. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

John I. Capturing Product Line Information from Legacy User Documentation. In: Käköla T, Duenas JC, editors. Software Product Lines. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2006. p. 127–59.

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. Cancer Drug Shows Promise In Treating Spinal Cord Injuries [Internet]. IFLScience. 2015 [cited 2018 Oct 30];Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/cancer-drug-shows-promise-treating-spinal-cord-injuries/

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. Federal Student Aid: Expanding Eligibility for Less Than Halftime Students Could Increase Program Costs, But Benefits Uncertain. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2003.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Cho Y. Chinese restaurant business and Taiwanese pentecostalism in Southern California. 2013;

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

Lee L. Loving Trees, Even the Messy Ones. New York Times. 2014;D2.

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