AMA citation format is a citation style designed by the American Medical Association. It’s frequently used in the field of medicine.
You may be told to use AMA style for your student papers. You will also have to follow this style if you’re submitting a paper to a journal published by the AMA.
In AMA citation format, if you cite the same source more than once in your paper, it still only has one entry on your AMA reference page, numbered based on the first time you cite it.
This means you’ll always use the same number for the AMA in-text citation for that source, not a different number each time. You can add different page numbers to the citations to talk about specific parts of the source in each case, e.g. 1(pp13–15)
The names of up to six authors should be listed for each source on your AMA reference page, separated by commas. For a source with seven or more authors, you should list the first three followed by “et al”: “Isidore, Gilbert, Gunvor, et al.”
In the text, mentioning author names is optional (as they aren’t an official part of AMA in-text citations). If you do mention them, though, you should use the first author’s name followed by “et al” when there are three or more: “Isidore et al argue that …”
Note that according to AMA’s rather minimalistic punctuation guidelines, there’s no period after “et al” unless it appears at the end of a sentence. This is different from most other styles, where there is normally a period.
Yes, you should normally include an access date in an AMA website citation (or when citing any source with a URL). This is because webpages can change their content over time, so it’s useful for the reader to know when you accessed the page.
When a publication or update date is provided on the page, you should include it in addition to the access date. The access date appears second in this case, e.g., “Published June 19, 2021. Accessed August 29, 2022.”
Don’t include an access date when citing a source with a DOI (such as in an AMA journal article citation).
An AMA reference usually includes the author’s last name and initials, the title of the source, information about the publisher or the publication it’s contained in, and the publication date. The specific details included, and the formatting, depend on the source type.
References in AMA style are presented in numerical order (numbered by the order in which they were first cited in the text) on your reference page. A source that’s cited repeatedly in the text still only appears once on the reference page.
An AMA in-text citation consists of the number of the relevant reference on your AMA reference page, written in superscript1 at the point in the text where the source is used.
It may also include the page number or range of the relevant material in the source (e.g., the part you quoted2(p46)). Multiple sources can be cited at one point, presented as a range or list (with no spaces3,5–9).
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The Scribbr Citation Generator is developed using the open-source Citation Style Language (CSL) project and Frank Bennett’s citeproc-js. It’s the same technology used by dozens of other popular citation tools, including Mendeley and Zotero.
You can find all the citation styles and locales used in the Scribbr Citation Generator in our publicly accessible repository on Github.
