Create a spot-on reference in Vancouver
General rules
In accordance with the rules of Vancouver Style, the following template should be used for creating a bibliographic reference to a preprint:
Author(s). Preprint title [Internet]. Name of repository [Preprint]. Year [cited date cited]: number of pages. Available from: URL
N.B. The number of pages element is optional.
For the rules of citing authors’ names is Vancouver Style, see this article.
The manual of Vancouver Style suggests that a preprint is most often an electronic document published online and thus does not provide any explicit instructions for citing the print versions. For this type of preprints, you can use the adapted Vancouver template for referencing a book:
Author(s). Title [Preprint]. City: Publisher; year. Number of pages.
Examples in a list of references
Heinken A, Magnúsdóttir S, Fleming RM, Thiele I. DEMETER: efficient simultaneous curation of genome-scale reconstructions guided by experimental data and refined gene annotations [Internet]. arXiv [Preprint]. 2021 [cited 2021 Jun 29]: 6 p. Available from: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.06638
Brown TA, Schaefer KS, Tsang A, Yi HA, Grimm JB, Lemire AL, Jradi FM, Kim C, McGowan K, Armstrong DT, Mostafa HH, Korff W, Vale RD, Lavis LD. Direct detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA using high-contrast pH-sensitive dyes [Internet]. medRxiv [Preprint]. 2021 [cited 2021 Jun 29]: 29 p. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.26.20248878