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The Bibliographic Study & Citing References Using the Vancouver Style

Practical activity

The bibliographic study is the study of the specialized literature by consulting scientific articles, papers, specialized books and treatises on the subject that you intend to research. It is an essential stage in the preparation and construction of a research, as well as in the communication of its results.

Once the research idea has been established, the following step is bibliographic documentation. The identification data of scientific articles, papers, specialized books and treatises (authors, title ...) together with the notes and / or the summary of the article constitute a bibliographic record. This helps you easily retrieve information from articles or books that you find of interest when documenting your future research. The bibliographic records will later be used to justify the information presented in your work, by quoting the corresponding scientific works, as well as to build the reference list that you will write in the "References" section, arranged in the order in which they have been quoted in your work.
Bibliographic documentation is performed by accessing various sources such as: the personal library, the University Library, the Electronic Library of UMF Cluj (http://www.umfcluj.ro/educatie-ro/reurseedu-ro/biblioteca-ro), specialty journals (PubMed: www.pubmed.gov, SpringerLink: www.springerlink.com, ScienceDirect: www.sciencedirect.com, ProQuest, Oxford Journals, BMJ Journals, Thieme, Medline, Thomson Micromedex, The Cochrane Collaboration: http://www.cochranelibrary.com, Dentistry and Oral Sciences (DOSS): https://health.ebsco.com/products/dentistry-oral-sciences-source, EMBASE: www.embase.com, etc.).
PubMed (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed), the database of the National Medicine Library of the United States of America, is a free resource that provides access to MEDLINE, quotes and abstracts in the fields of medicine (general, dental, veterinary), nursing, and life sciences. PubMed allows searching for specialized articles by providing access to their abstracts. For some of these articles it also provides access to their full-text or links to the publishing journal. The search terms used by PubMed are those of the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings), a standard dictionary of medical terms. For more details regarding MeSH, you can access the following resource: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/video.

A PubMed search allows you to identify the following pieces of information:

• Title of the article
• Authors' names
• Abbreviation of the journal, year of publication, volume, issue, extreme pages
• Language in which the article was published (if not English)
• Searching with PubMed also allows certain restrictions to be imposed, regarding the:
  • Article type (review, editorial, original article, clinical trial, etc.)
  • Type of access (abstract / full text - link to the journal where the article was published / free full text - access to Open Access articles)
  • Publication period
  • Species (human / animal subjects)
  • Other additional filters (the language in which the article was published, demographic criteria: age, gender).

Quoting references in Vancouver style

If you use information from published sources in your texts, or cite a full or partial text, you must clearly state this. By using a reference, you credit the authors of that source and defend yourself from possible accusations of plagiarism or pertaining to the truthfulness and accuracy of the respective information. A reference links your text to the original source of the information.
The reference citation style in the medical field uses the Vancouver system.

Its use implies:
signaling the use of a reference in the text by inserting numbers between straight brackets. These numbers will be in ascending order, starting from the beginning of the document.
the existence of a numbered references list at the end of the document, containing the details of the sources quoted in the text. These details will be written in a standard format, specific to each type of quoted document (article published in a printed magazine, article published on the internet, book, book chapter, etc.)

Example of Vancouver style citations

Formatting the reference list - punctuation marks, separators between entities, etc. - depends on the type of quoted document.

References for original articles published in printed journals

General structure:
Name of author(s) followed by first name(s) initial(s)¹. Article title. Abbreviated name of the journal². year of publication;volume number(issue number)³:extreme pages⁴.
1 For the initial / initials of the surname, no spaces or punctuation marks are used between the initials, the authors are separated by commas (,) and if there are 7 or more authors, only the first 6 authors are mentioned, followed by the expression: , et al.
2 To find the abbreviation of a journal, you can use the following link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/journals
3 the volume number usually corresponds to the number of appearances of the journal since its launch and is followed, between round brackets, by the issue number inside that volume
4 The first and last pages of the article, while omitting all repeating digits in the last page.

Example:

The Reference: Pompili M, Riccardi L, Covino M, Barbaro B, Di Stasi C, Orefice R, et al. Contrastenhanced gray-scale harmonic ultrasound in the efficacy assessment of ablation treatments for hepatocellular carcinoma. Liver Int. 2005;25(5):954-61.

References for original articles published in on-line journals, only in electronic format

General structure:
Author(s)¹. Article title. Abbreviated name of the journal [Internet] year of publication [cited citation date²]; volume number(issue number):article identifier. Available from: web page address.
1 For the initial / initials of the surname, no spaces or punctuation marks are used between the initials, the authors are separated by commas (,) and if there are 7 or more authors, only the first 6 authors are mentioned, followed by the expression: , et al.
2 The current date, when you have consulted and cited the article
Optionally, if available, you can add electronic identification information: Digital Object Identifier (DOI) - useful for easy Internet search, PubMed ID - unique ID number in the Medline / Pubmed database, or PubMed Central PMCID: doi: zzzzzzz. PubMed PMID: zzzzzzz; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC zzzzzzz.
Example of a reference to an original article from a journal published in electronic format:

The reference: Dudea D, Lasserre JF, Alb C, Culic B, Pop Ciutrila IS, Colosi H. Patients' perspective on dental aesthetics in a South-Eastern European community. J Dent [Internet] 2012 [cited 2018 Mar 2];40 Suppl 1:e72-81. DOI: 10.1016/j.jdent.2012.01.016. Available from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300571212000255?via%3Dihub

References for books

General structure:

Author(s)¹. Book title. Edition². Publication place³: Publisher; year of publication.
1 For the initial / initials of the surname, no spaces or punctuation marks are used between the initials, the authors are separated by commas (,) and if there are 7 or more authors, only the first 6 authors are mentioned, followed by the expression: , et al.
2 If the book is at its first edition, this piece of information is omitted
3 The city in which the publisher is based
As a rule, all the information required to build the reference is contained on the cover and on the first pages of the book.

Example:

Eisen HN. Immunology: an introduction to molecular and cellular principles of the immune response. 5th ed. New York: Harper and Row; 1974.

More details on the Vancouver citation system can be found at: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/uniform_requirements.html

Practical activity

Aims and benefits of this practical activit:

• Performing a scenario based search using the PICO method.
• Creating a search strategy to identify a manageable number of articles on a certain research topic.
• Using Clinical Queries and search restrictions by certain criteria offered in PubMed (e.g. by article type, year of publication, etc.).
• Acquiring the skills for writing references in the Vancouver style standard.
• Creating a bibliographic record file with a table of contents, to easily retrieve items of interest by title.
• Aquiring bibliographic documentation skills for research and current practice.

Clinical Queries allows the search for clinical studies according to their type: therapy, diagnostic, prognostic (risk factors).

On Infomed server, in your own folder make a new LAB01 folder. Download the following file in this folder and answer inside to all practical activities requiered. Save the file.

LAB 01 - Practical Activity

Ussefull web links:

• PICO Query: https://pubmedhh.nlm.nih.gov/nlmd/pico/piconew.php
• Pubmed Clinical Query: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/clinical