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

Froese R. Fishery reform slips through the net. Nature 2011;475(7354):7.

A journal article with 2 authors

Raper SCB, Braithwaite RJ. Low sea level rise projections from mountain glaciers and icecaps under global warming. Nature 2006;439(7074):311–3.

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang YG, Pagani M, Liu Z. A 12-million-year temperature history of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Science 2014;344(6179):84–7.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Imai H, Obara K, Diamond PJ, Omodaka T, Sasao T. A collimated jet of molecular gas from a star on the asymptotic giant branch. Nature 2002;417(6891):829–31.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Dean JR. Practical Inductively Coupled Plasma Spectroscopy: Dean/Plasma. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2005.

An edited book

Scott J, Stoeckli E, editors. Neuromedia: Art and Neuroscience Research. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2012.

A chapter in an edited book

Rubio E, Castillo O. A New Proposal for a Granular Fuzzy C-Means Algorithm. In: Melin P, Castillo O, Kacprzyk J, editors. Design of Intelligent Systems Based on Fuzzy Logic, Neural Networks and Nature-Inspired Optimization. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015. p. 47–57.

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 D. 15 Healthy Eating Habits That Work, According To Science [Internet]. IFLScience. 2016 [cited 2018 Oct 30];Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/15-healthy-eating-habits-that-work-according-to-science/

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. Air Force ADP Procurement: Contracting and Market Share Information. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1990.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Ray SE. Impact of Training Intervention on Emotional Intelligence in Health Care Administrators and Physician Leaders. 2012;

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

Cotter H. A Chinatown Installation Aims to Provoke. New York Times. 2017;C19.

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