Vancouver Referencing for MD, MS and MDS Theses in Nepal: Formats and Common Errors
13 October 2026 · 8 min read
Postgraduate medical theses in Nepal are referenced in Vancouver style, a numbered system that the biomedical journals share. The IOM guideline, BPKIHS, KUSMS and PAHS all point to it, and the MEC-era protocol templates assume it. What they rarely give you is one worked page showing what a reference should look like. This is that page.
Two cautions first. Vancouver is a family, not a single document: institutions and journals differ on small points such as bracket style and how many authors to list. And the document that binds you is your institution’s thesis guideline, not this post. Use the formats below as the default shape, then check them against one example in your own guideline.
How the numbering works
Sources are numbered in the order they are first cited in the text, not alphabetically.
The number appears in the text where the source is used, in square brackets or superscript depending on your institution. Pick one and keep it.
A source cited again keeps its original number. It never gets a second entry.
The reference list at the end runs 1, 2, 3 in that same order. If the list is alphabetical, it is the wrong style.
Several sources at once are written as a range or list, for example [3–5] or [2,7].
ICMJE’s recommendations say the same: references are numbered consecutively in the order they are first mentioned, and follow the NLM’s sample references.
Journal article
Authors, title in sentence case, journal abbreviation, year, volume, issue in brackets, pages. The entry below uses placeholder names; it shows the pattern, not a real paper.
Surname AB, Surname CD, Surname EF. Title of the article in sentence case. J Abbrev. 2024;62(3):145-52.
With a DOI, add it at the end: doi:10.xxxx/xxxxx.
Journal names are abbreviated the way MEDLINE abbreviates them, without full stops. Look the abbreviation up in the NLM Catalog rather than guessing.
Page ranges drop the repeated leading digits: 145-52, not 145-152.
On authors: NLM’s current guidance lists all of them. The older convention, which many institutions still use, lists the first six and then adds et al. Your guideline will say which. If it says nothing, six then et al. is the safe default in a thesis.
Book and book chapter
Book: Surname AB, Surname CD. Title of book. 4th ed. City: Publisher; 2020.
Chapter: Surname AB. Title of chapter. In: Editor CD, editor. Title of book. 2nd ed. City: Publisher; 2018. p. 112-30.
A first edition carries no edition statement. Later editions do.
Guidelines, reports and web pages
Protocols cite documents that are not journal articles: the national ethical guidelines, a ministry report, the institution’s own thesis guideline. The pattern is the organisation as author, the title, [Internet], place and publisher, year, the date you accessed it in brackets, then the link.
Organisation. Title of the document [Internet]. City: Publisher; 2022 [cited 2026 Oct 13]. Available from: URL
The cited date is the day you opened it, not the publication date. Government PDFs move without redirects, so keep the date.
A thesis you are citing as a source: Surname AB. Title [dissertation]. City: University; 2021.
Where an official Nepali document has no English edition, cite the Nepali title and add an English translation in square brackets, then say in the text that the translation is yours.
What reviewers send back
A reference list in alphabetical order under a numbered in-text system.
A number in the text with no matching entry, or an entry nobody cites. Check both directions before submission.
The same paper listed twice under two numbers.
Journal titles in full in one entry and abbreviated in the next.
Mixed punctuation: some entries with full stops after initials, some without.
Titles in Title Case Throughout. Vancouver uses sentence case for article titles.
Web pages with no cited date, or a link that no longer opens.
APA author-year citations pasted in from another document. Converting a reference manager’s output from APA to Vancouver after the fact is where most of these come from.
Set the style once, at the start
A reference manager does the numbering and the punctuation, provided the style is right from the first citation. Choose a Vancouver style in the plugin before you write, then compare its output against one example from your department. Where the plugin and your guideline disagree, the guideline wins. Our guide to Zotero and Mendeley covers the setup.
Have a protocol or thesis whose references need checking against Vancouver before it goes to your guide? Assignment Nepal can audit the reference list and in-text numbering. We tidy and check; we do not invent sources. Message us on WhatsApp at +977 9768768340.
Not sure if your work has plagiarism? Don't worry. Send it to us.
Tell us what you need checked and when it is due. Your document is checked without being stored in any student-paper repository, so the check never counts against your real submission. The reports come back with what each match means, not just a percentage.
Plagiarism report — The full similarity report on your assignment, proposal or chapter: every matched source listed, every flagged passage marked, and a plain read of which matches matter and which are your reference list doing its job.
AI report — The AI writing indicator read separately from similarity, because the two scores behave differently. If the flag looks like a detector artefact on work you wrote yourself, we tell you so, and what evidence answers it.
Thesis report — Similarity and AI reports for a full thesis or dissertation, run chapter by chapter so a problem in the literature review is found while you can still fix it, with each flagged passage explained for your supervisor.