Research Guides: Physical Therapy: Citing Your Sources

Citing your sources in AMA

*AMA is the citation style of the American Medical Association.

Free and trustworthy online AMA citation guide:

Purdue University OWL online AMA citation guide - has examples of AMA-formatted citations

when looking online for examples of citations:

Trust websites with .edu, or lib, or libguide in the url. These are usually sites made by librarians

Do not trust bib.me or citation machine websites. The examples on these cites are often generated by algorithms, and are no more trustworthy or accurate than google translate.

Find two examples or websites that agree before you follow their advice or formatting

How to look online for examples of citations

a good search:

AMA cite 7 authors reference page

this is a good search because it specifies the style (AMA), as well as what kind of citation you're looking for: reference page (versus in-text)

a bad search:

cite 7 authors

this search is not so good. You'll get results in APA, MLA, and all kinds of other styles, as well as both in-text and reference page citation examples

When do I need to cite a source?

using a direct quotation
using facts that are not common knowledge
Paraphrasing or rewriting the author’s ideas in your own words
Using the key words or phrases of the author or using synonyms
Mentioning the author’s name in your text
Writing a sentence that mostly consists of your own thoughts, but makes a reference to another author’s ideas

When in doubt, cite. If there is a question in your mind about whether you need to cite a reference, you should.

(material from New York Medical College libguide "AMA (11/e) Style Guide" 2020.)

When is citing not necessary?

Writing your own lived experiences, your own observations and insights, your own thoughts, and your own conclusions about a subject.
When you are writing up your own results obtained through lab or field experiments.
When you use your own artwork, digital photographs, video, audio, etc.
When you are using "common knowledge," things like folklore, common sense observations, myths, urban legends, and historical events (but not historical documents).
When you are using generally-accepted facts (e.g., pollution is bad for the environment) including facts that are accepted within particular discourse communities (e.g., in the field of composition studies, "writing is a process" is a generally-accepted fact).

(material from New York Medical College libguide "AMA (11/e) Style Guide" 2020.)

General AMA formatting:

Left-alignment, 1" margins, 1/2" indents, place page number in top right corner of header (beginning with title page

14 point and lower serif font for body text, 14 point and higher Sans-serif font for titles and subtitles

Superscirpt: AMA style uses a superscript number to cite sources referred to in the body of a paper. A Superscipt number is a number smaller than the normal line of font and set slightly above it.

place the numerals outside of periods and commas and inside colons and semicolons
When multiple sources are consulted to present a fact or prepare an idea, cite each source, and use hyphens to join the first and last numbers of a closed series, or commas without space to separate numbers

Reference list: AMA requires the reference list to appear at the end of a paper on its own page. Title the page References, and place the title in the top, centered.

list references in numerical order, in order of appearance within the paper
List the author’s last name followed by initials without periods. If there are between 1 and 6 authors, list all authors separated by commas. If there are more than 6 authors, list the first 3 followed by “et al.” [no quotation marks]
Abbreviate journal titles according to the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) Catalog. Please note: make sure you are using the journal name, not the name of the database or publisher
Do not enter spaces between the year, volume, issue, and page numbers (and any intervening punctuation) when creating a reference
Provide the most direct URL (the journal publisher’s website) to an electronic article and the date it was accessed if it does not have a doi (e.g., www.elsevier.com/locate/fbio. Accessed October 5, 2015)
- DO NOT use the E-Z proxy library url through which you accessed the article. Other users will not be able to log in, and this url will be a dead-end for them