How to cite a journal article depends entirely on the citation style your discipline or target journal uses. The same paper is formatted differently in APA, Vancouver, and AMA, and getting the details wrong is a common reason manuscripts are returned for correction. The good news is that every journal citation draws on the same underlying information; once you have collected it, applying any style is mechanical.
This guide shows the journal article citation for one example paper in all three major styles, then covers the edge cases that cause the most confusion: missing DOIs, no named author, and online-only articles.
Before formatting, gather these elements from the article's first page or its database record:
- Authors (surnames and initials, in the order listed)
- Year of publication
- Article title
- Journal title (full and abbreviated)
- Volume, issue, and page range
- DOI (digital object identifier), if one exists
The single most reliable source for all of this is the article's own record in PubMed or the publisher's site, not a secondhand reference. Transcription errors, especially in the DOI, are easy to introduce and look careless, so copy and paste rather than retype.
The Same Article in Three Styles
Take a hypothetical 2024 article by Smith, Patel, and Okonkwo titled "Antimicrobial stewardship in intensive care," published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, volume 24, issue 3, pages 311 to 319.
APA (author-date, journal title spelled out):
Smith, J. R., Patel, A., & Okonkwo, C. (2024). Antimicrobial stewardship in intensive care. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 24(3), 311-319. https://doi.org/10.1016/example
Vancouver (numbered, NLM abbreviation):
- Smith JR, Patel A, Okonkwo C. Antimicrobial stewardship in intensive care. Lancet Infect Dis. 2024;24(3):311-19.
AMA (numbered, superscript in text, italic title):
- Smith JR, Patel A, Okonkwo C. Antimicrobial stewardship in intensive care. Lancet Infect Dis. 2024;24(3):311-319. doi:10.1016/example
The differences are instructive. APA inverts only initials and joins the last two authors with an ampersand; the numbered styles drop the ampersand and the periods on initials. APA spells out the journal title; Vancouver and AMA abbreviate it. APA and AMA give the full page range; some Vancouver variants elide repeated digits (311-19). For the in-text marker, APA uses (Smith et al., 2024) while the numbered styles use a numeral keyed to citation order.
Handling the Common Edge Cases
No DOI. Many older and some online-only articles have no DOI. Cite everything else as normal and simply omit it. In APA, an online-only article with no DOI can carry the stable URL instead.
No named author. Reports and guidelines are often authored by an organisation. Use the organisation in the author position (for example, World Health Organization). If there is genuinely no author and no organisation, move the title into the author slot. Avoid "Anonymous" unless the source itself uses it.
Journal abbreviation unknown. For the numbered styles, do not guess. Search the NLM Catalog for the official abbreviation. Inventing one is a frequent and easily avoided error.
Citing one article by hand is straightforward. Citing two hundred for a literature review or commission a full systematic review by hand is where errors multiply and consistency breaks down. This is exactly what reference managers are for; our comparison of the best reference managers covers tools that store the underlying data once and output any style on demand, renumbering and reordering automatically. The underlying logic of why these styles differ, numbered versus author-date, is covered in our explainer on in-text citations and the reference list.
When a reference list runs long or the submission is high stakes, the most reliable approach is to manage references in software and then have an editor verify the final output against the target journal's instructions. Our academic editing and manuscript editing teams do this verification as standard.
In practice you rarely type a journal article citation from scratch. You export records from a database such as PubMed, Scopus, or Web of Science, then convert them into the style your target journal requires. The reliable path is to keep the structured identifier with each record. If you have a DOI or a PubMed ID, the article metadata can be retrieved automatically, which removes most manual keystrokes and the errors they introduce in author initials, page ranges, and volume numbers. Our citation generator does exactly this: paste a DOI or PMID, pick Vancouver, APA, AMA, Harvard, MLA, or Chicago, and it returns the reference and the in-text marker. For a large reference set, export the whole library as BibTeX or RIS and import it into a manager from our best reference managers comparison. Whichever route you take, always check the final entry against the original article, because exported metadata is sometimes incomplete or inconsistently capitalised.