Vancouver style
How to cite a website in Vancouver style
Web pages often hide the author, the date, or both — and every style has a different rule for what to do when a required element simply does not exist.
THE FORMAT
A website in Vancouver, at a glance
#. Author AA or Organization. Title of the page [Internet]. Place: Publisher; Year [updated Year Mon DD; cited Year Mon DD]. Available from: URL
4. Royal College of Perioperative Medicine. Preoperative fasting: guidance for adults [Internet]. London: RCPM; 2023 [updated 2024 Nov 12; cited 2025 Mar 4]. Available from: https://www.rcpm.org.uk/guidance/preoperative-fasting
Clear fluids are now permitted up to two hours before induction.⁴
In prose: Current national guidance⁴ permits clear fluids up to two hours before induction.
5. Understanding your discharge summary [Internet]. Manchester: Northfield Teaching Hospitals; [date unknown] [cited 2025 Mar 4]. Available from: https://www.northfieldth.nhs.uk/patients/discharge-summary
In text: Patient-facing explanations of the discharge summary vary widely between trusts.⁵
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 website
Elements to collect
- Author — a person if one is credited, otherwise the organization
- Date of publication or last update
- Title of the specific page (not the whole site)
- Name of the website or publishing organization
- URL
- Date you accessed it, when the style requires one
Rules specific to this entry
- The “[Internet]” tag after the title is not optional. It is how a Vancouver reader distinguishes a web page from a print document, and it appears on web-hosted journals, books, and databases too.
- The cited date is required and shares a bracket with the update date: “[updated 2024 Nov 12; cited 2025 Mar 4]”. Dates are written year, abbreviated month, day, with no commas.
- When the organization is both author and publisher, Vancouver still gives both — the full name in the author slot and the accepted short form after the place. The repetition looks redundant and is correct.
- “Available from:” is spelled out with a colon, and the URL ends the entry with no closing period, so a reader copying it does not pick up a stray character.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element Vancouver needs for a website: Author — a person if one is credited, otherwise the organization; Date of publication or last update; Title of the specific page (not the whole site); Name of the website or publishing organization.
Build the references entry
Arrange those details in the Vancouver order: #. Author AA or Organization. Title of the page [Internet]. Place: Publisher; Year [updated Year Mon DD; cited Year Mon DD]. Available from: URL
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as Clear fluids are now permitted up to two hours before induction.⁴ — or work the same reference into your sentence as Current national guidance⁴ permits clear fluids up to two hours before induction..
Check it against the exceptions
The “[Internet]” tag after the title is not optional. It is how a Vancouver reader distinguishes a web page from a print document, and it appears on web-hosted journals, books, and databases too.
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 website in another style
Switching styles late in a draft is normal. Here is the same source formatted five other ways.
Questions about Vancouver and websites
What if the website 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 website?
Author — a person if one is credited, otherwise the organization, Date of publication or last update, Title of the specific page (not the whole site), and the rest of the elements listed above. Web pages often hide the author, the date, or both — and every style has a different rule for what to do when a required element simply does not exist.
Is there anything unusual about a website in Vancouver?
The “[Internet]” tag after the title is not optional. It is how a Vancouver reader distinguishes a web page from a print document, and it appears on web-hosted journals, books, and databases too.
What else catches people out here?
The cited date is required and shares a bracket with the update date: “[updated 2024 Nov 12; cited 2025 Mar 4]”. Dates are written year, abbreviated month, day, with no commas.
Can I reformat this website 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.
