Vancouver style
How to cite a interview in Vancouver style
Interviews you conducted yourself are usually personal communication — cited in the text but absent from the reference list — while published interviews are cited like any other recorded source.
THE FORMAT
A interview in Vancouver, at a glance
#. Interviewee AA. Title of the interview. Interviewed by Interviewer BB. Publication Name. Year Mon;Volume(Issue):Pages.
4. Byrne KJ. We stopped treating handover as paperwork. Interviewed by Marchetti C. Br J Hosp Med. 2024 Sep;85(9):412-15.
The clinical lead has described handover redesign as a staffing problem rather than a documentation one.⁴
In prose: Byrne⁴ describes handover redesign as a staffing problem that had been mistaken for a documentation one.
Not listed in the references at all. The attribution lives inside the sentence, so this source is never numbered.
In text: …although two of the three units had already abandoned the checklist (K. J. Byrne, personal communication, 2024 Nov 12).
Copyeditor formats APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE automatically — cite a source once and the references builds itself. See how citations work .
BEFORE YOU FORMAT
What Vancouver needs from a interview
Elements to collect
- Name of the person interviewed
- Name of the interviewer, for a published interview
- Full date of the interview
- Where it was published or broadcast, when it was
- Format — transcript, audio recording, personal communication
Rules specific to this entry
- An interview you conducted yourself is a personal communication. Under ICMJE rules it is cited in the running text only, never numbered and never in the reference list, and only with the person’s written permission.
- A published interview is cited as whatever carried it — a journal piece, a magazine article, a broadcast — with the interviewee leading and “Interviewed by” naming the interviewer. This follows the same role-word convention Vancouver uses for editors and hosts.
- This is where Vancouver and IEEE diverge most sharply. IEEE gives your own interview a numbered entry as a “private communication”; Vancouver keeps it out of the list entirely. Converting a manuscript between the two means references quietly appearing or disappearing.
- Because a personal communication cannot be verified by a reader, use it only for facts no published source carries, and say in the sentence what kind of contact it was.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element Vancouver needs for a interview: Name of the person interviewed; Name of the interviewer, for a published interview; Full date of the interview; Where it was published or broadcast, when it was.
Build the references entry
Arrange those details in the Vancouver order: #. Interviewee AA. Title of the interview. Interviewed by Interviewer BB. Publication Name. Year Mon;Volume(Issue):Pages.
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as The clinical lead has described handover redesign as a staffing problem rather than a documentation one.⁴ — or work the same reference into your sentence as Byrne⁴ describes handover redesign as a staffing problem that had been mistaken for a documentation one..
Check it against the exceptions
An interview you conducted yourself is a personal communication. Under ICMJE rules it is cited in the running text only, never numbered and never in the reference list, and only with the person’s written permission.
Vancouver RULES
The conventions behind every Vancouver entry
Citing Medicine (NLM), 2nd ed. — the reference standard behind Vancouver is the authority. Where a journal or department publishes its own house rules, those win — check your submission guidelines before the references is final.
The rules that apply across every source — author order, capitalization, how the references is sorted, and where Vancouver entries most often go wrong — are collected on the Vancouver style guide.
The same interview in another style
Switching styles late in a draft is normal. Here is the same source formatted five other ways.
Questions about Vancouver and interviews
What if the interview has no author?
Start the entry with the title and keep the number you already assigned it. A numeric references never re-sorts for a missing author, so the entry stays exactly where it is.
What do I need before I can cite a interview?
Name of the person interviewed, Name of the interviewer, for a published interview, Full date of the interview, and the rest of the elements listed above. Interviews you conducted yourself are usually personal communication — cited in the text but absent from the reference list — while published interviews are cited like any other recorded source.
Is there anything unusual about a interview in Vancouver?
An interview you conducted yourself is a personal communication. Under ICMJE rules it is cited in the running text only, never numbered and never in the reference list, and only with the person’s written permission.
What else catches people out here?
A published interview is cited as whatever carried it — a journal piece, a magazine article, a broadcast — with the interviewee leading and “Interviewed by” naming the interviewer. This follows the same role-word convention Vancouver uses for editors and hosts.
Can I reformat this interview in another style later?
By hand, you would retype the entry — the element order, punctuation and italics all differ between styles. In Copyeditor, sources are stored as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole reference list at once.
Cite it once
and never reformat it again
Copyeditor keeps sources as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole references at once.
