How to format your references using the JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) (JAMA). 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Burns MA. Analytic chemistry. Everyone’s a (future) chemist. Science. 2002;296(5574):1818-1819.

A journal article with 2 authors

Xiang Y, Kobilka BK. Myocyte adrenoceptor signaling pathways. Science. 2003;300(5625):1530-1532.

A journal article with 3 authors

Yamashita T, Hige T, Takahashi T. Vesicle endocytosis requires dynamin-dependent GTP hydrolysis at a fast CNS synapse. Science. 2005;307(5706):124-127.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Crowther TW, Machmuller MB, Carey JC, et al. Crowther et al. reply. Nature. 2018;554(7693):E7-E8.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Smith CL. Distillation Control. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2012.

An edited book

Beaufils P, Verdonk R, eds. The Meniscus. Springer; 2010.

A chapter in an edited book

Siqueira TLL, Ciferri RR, Times VC, de Aguiar Ciferri CD. Benchmarking Spatial Data Warehouses. In: Bach Pedersen T, Mohania MK, Tjoa AM, eds. Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery: 12th International Conference, DAWAK 2010, Bilbao, Spain, August/September 2010. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer; 2010:40-51.

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 JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association).

Blog post

Andrew E. Cancer Drug Cures Mice Of Hepatitis B. IFLScience. April 22, 2015. Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/cancer-drug-cures-mice-hepatitis-b/

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. Computers in Government: We Couldn’t Do Without Them. U.S. Government Printing Office; 1980.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Young WB. First-Generation Undergraduate Researchers: Engaging and Validating Cultural Wealth-Based Self-Authors. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach; 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

Ratliff B. An Online Record Shop for the Faster, Punker Set. New York Times. August 19, 2016:C1.

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	JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association)
Abbreviation	JAMA
ISSN (print)	0098-7484
ISSN (online)	1538-3598
Scope	General Medicine