From today, our website offers a new citation style – the Vancouver referencing style, which is used widely in medical and biological sciences.
As always, we wrote all our referencing algorithms based on a detailed analysis of the rules stipulated in the Vancouver manual – Citing Medicine: The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (2nd ed.) – and of the recommendations of local universities. Thanks to this, you can get the most exact Vancouver references in different languages – English, French, Italian, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Polish – with the complete adaptation of all elements.
Moreover, the bibliography menu settings allow you creating different types of in-text citations in line with Vancouver.
Vancouver references on Grafiati vs Zotero / Mendeley / Citethisforme
We are often asked how the references generated by Grafiati differ from the other services. Let's look at a brief comparison based on the Vancouver style.
All services such as Zotero, Mendeley, Citethisforme, and the like use the same open-source code for generating citations, i.e. they do not develop their own referencing algorithms. As a result, in these services, you almost always get identical references with the same errors. In contrast, we at Grafiati develop all our algorithms from scratch, which allows achieving higher precision in references.
So, here are some of the Vancouver style aspects that you can recreate precisely only with the help of our service:
1. Authors' names
Vancouver Style requires to give only the first two initials of persons:
| Grafiati | Zotero / Citethisforme / etc. | |
| Andrew George Michael Brewster | Brewster AG | Brewster AGM |
All punctuation in the initials is to be omitted:
| Grafiati | Zotero / Citethisforme / etc. | |
| Jean-Luc Dubois | Dubois JL | Dubois J-L |
2. Place of publication, publisher, and date of publication
If any of these elements is absent, Vancouver Style requires indicating this with the signatures '[place unknown]', '[publisher unknown]', '[date unknown]'. In applications such as Zotero, Mendeley, and the like, these elements are being ignored completely, and your references can end in unallowed punctuation:
| Grafiati | Zotero / Citethisforme / etc. |
| Taylor A. Mathematics. London: [publisher unknown; date unknown]. | Taylor A. Mathematics. London; |
3. Type of medium
In Vancouver Style, the signature '[Internet]' should be given for online sources. For dissertations and theses, it should be modified as '[dissertation on the Internet]':
| Grafiati | Zotero / Citethisforme / etc. |
|
Finley LC. The role of strategic governance in reducing infant mortality under crisis conditions [Ph.D. dissertation on the Internet]. Portland, OR: Portland State University; 2020 [cited 2021 Jan 14]. 270 p. Available from: https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/ |
Finley LC. The role of strategic governance in reducing infant mortality under crisis conditions [Internet] [Ph.D. dissertation]. [Portland, OR]: Portland State University; 2020 [cited 2021 Jan 14]. Available from: https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/ |
4. Hyperlinks (URLs)
Vancouver requires to put a full stop after an URL ending in a slash:
| Grafiati | Zotero / Citethisforme / etc. |
|
<…> Available from: https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/ |
<…> Available from: https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/ |
5. Patents
Vancouver Style has detailed instructions on the obligatory indication of the names of inventors and assignees together with their appropriate roles in patents. Moreover, the patent country is also to be given:
| Grafiati | Zotero / Citethisforme / etc. |
|
Sumnicht DW, Miller JH, inventors; Georgia-Pacific Consumer Products LP, assignee. Absorbent sheet incorporating regenerated cellulose microfiber [Internet]. United States patent US8187421B2. 2012 May 29 [cited 2021 Jan 13]. 57 p. Available from: https://patents.google.com/ patent/US8187421B2/. |
Sumnicht DW, Miller JH. Absorbent sheet incorporating regenerated cellulose microfiber [Internet]. US8187421B2 [cited 2021 Jan 13]. Available from: https://patents.google.com/ patent/US8187421B2/ |
6. Localisation
Localisation in Zotero does not depend on the Vancouver style and is based on low-quality machine translation. Here is an example of the localisation into Ukrainian on Grafiati and in Zotero:
| Grafiati | Zotero / Citethisforme / etc. |
| Савчук ЛА. Анатомія. 3-тє вид. Київ: Медична книга; 2020. | Савчук ЛА. Анатомія. 3ий вид. Київ: Медична книга; 2020. |
In addition, we offer many other features: you can references laws of different states (and not only the US), create detailed references to archival documents, and use tools to fine-tine your lists of references.