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Clear and consistent formatting helps make your research paper more readable and understandable, besides making it easier for your readers to locate any information they’re searching for. If you’re conducting research in the biomedical sciences, you’ll often have to use the American Medical Association (AMA)’s guidelines to format your paper. That’s why we put together this quick and handy introduction to the AMA style manual and its key recommendations.
What is AMA Style?
Many biomedical journals follow the guidelines set in the 11th edition of the AMA Manual of Style. This comprehensive style guide is a must-have for authors, copyeditors, proofreaders, or journal editors in medicine and life sciences. It covers practically everything related to writing and formatting a research paper, right from converting SI units to gene and protein nomenclature, and even how to discuss suicide. In this article, we’ll cover the basics of AMA style, helping you navigate these formatting requirements while preparing your research paper for submission or resubmission to a journal.
General Manuscript Formatting Requirements in AMA Style
AMA is fairly flexible about page layout. Any legible font will do. We advise double line spacing and 1-inch margins on each page to avoid a cluttered look. For guidelines on creating a cover page, placement and numbering of tables and figures, and preparing supplementary information, it’s best to refer to the requirements of your target journal.
Language in AMA Style
The AMA style guide is quite particular about using non-discriminatory, inclusive, and accurate language. The 11th edition contains an entire chapter devoted to correct and preferred usage of medical terminology as well as how to describe age, sex, race, etc. without bias or demeaning terms. For instance, the manual advises researchers to avoid using “non-” as a descriptor for study groups (i.e., “White participants reported significantly more postoperative pain than non-White participants did”) because this kind of categorization is oversimplified and can lead to inaccurate conclusions.
The style guide also lists a number of preferred spelling and spacing practices, such as “brainstem” instead of “brain stem”, as well as a number of redundancies that should be avoided, such as “herein we describe” and “combine together”.
Numbers and Units in AMA Style
AMA style requires you to use digits for numbers and not spell them out unless at the beginning of a sentence or title, when quoting from other works, or when spelling out a number aids clarity (e.g., “At the initial assessment, nine 6-year-old participants exhibited spaced dentition”).
Also, you need to use SI ((Le Système International d’Unitiés) units when you’re reporting measurements such as length, volume, mass, temperature, pH, etc. Keep a space between the number and the unit, and don’t use a period after a unit unless it occurs at the end of a sentence.
Citations in AMA Style
While guides like APA use the authors’ last names and date of publication in citations, AMA requires you to indicate in-text citations with a superscript Arabic number. Place this number immediately after the material you’re referencing (not necessarily at the end of the sentence). These superscript numbers should be outside periods and commas but inside colons and semicolons. Citations should be numbered in sequence, and a range of references should be indicated using a hyphen. The author name(s) may or may not be used in the main text. Take a look at the following examples:
These inhibitors have demonstrated good efficacy and safety in several solid tumors.6-9
The incidence and mortality rates observed in the present study sharply contrast those found by Johnson and Davis21 in an outpatient population.
Importantly, it’s not advisable to place a citation number immediately after a number used in the main text, because the citation could be confused with an exponent. Revise the sentence so as to place the citation number after an actual word.
References in AMA Style
Your list of references should be placed at the end of the manuscript, and titled “References”. Each item is listed only once, based on its appearance in the main text. You use the author last names and their first and middle initials, without any periods after them. When there are multiple authors, you separate them using commas. You need to italicize the titles of books and the names of journals. Journal names are abbreviated without periods, according to the listing in the National Library of Medicine database. Article titles are presented in sentence case (only the first word and any proper nouns are capitalized). It’s also advisable to give DOIs where available.
Take a look at this example:
Walters M, Dunkerly S. Prognosis of prostate carcinoma in nursing home residents in Scotland. J Urol. 2016;15(10):173-178. doi: 10.1756/2012/672380
