We are delighted to welcome you to the online version of the AMA Manual of Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors, 11th edition. The 11th edition has been a major undertaking: 10 committee members have revised 23 chapters, regularly meeting to discuss changes and updates, consulting experts in various areas, and drafting multiple revisions following external reviews. This was a 5-year iterative process, and the AMA Manual of Style committee continues to update policy guidelines.
The online manual is fully searchable. Content is available to download to PDF, and figures and tables can be downloaded as PowerPoint slides. Content can also be shared via email or social media.
The nearly 1200-page book is enriched by a variety of online features. For example, regular updates to address changes in style or policies are featured in the Updates section. Any corrections are made online, so that you can be assured you are always looking at the latest guidelines as you use the manual.
In addition, we update and expand the style quizzes, allowing users to test their knowledge and offer teachers and managers a ready tool for helping individuals master AMA style.
The interactive SI conversion calculator is included in the AMA Manual of Style online, which allows quick conversion of units of measure from SI to conventional and vice versa. Conversions to metric measures are also available.
We welcome questions and comments on the manual (write to stylemanual@jamanetwork.org) and look forward to engaging with you.
~Stacy Christiansen, for the AMA Manual of Style Committee
The AMA Manual of Style online is available to institutions and libraries either via subscription or as a perpetual access purchase.
In its 11th edition, the manual has been thoroughly updated, including comprehensive guidance on reference citations (including how to cite journal articles, books, reports, websites, databases, social media, and more), an expanded chapter on data display (for the first time in full color), a completely up-to-date chapter on ethical and legal issues (covering everything from authorship and open access to corrections and intellectual property), and updated guidance on usage (from patient-first language and terms to avoid to preferred spelling and standards for sociodemographic descriptors).
The section on nomenclature has undergone thorough review and updating, covering many topics from genetics and organisms to drugs and radiology. The statistics and study design chapter has been extensively expanded, with more examples of usage and terms that link to a related glossary. Chapters on grammar, punctuation, abbreviations, capitalization, manuscript preparation, and editing feature refreshed examples and new entries (such as allowance of the singular they).
The AMA Manual of Style committee continuously updates policy guidelines. Find more information on what’s new.
Full of advice and examples on everything from style to statistics, the AMA Manual is an essential guide for those of us who write about medicine, edit such writing, or teach others to do these. Whether you keep this resource at your desk, bookmark it in your computer, or both, it deserves to be in easy reach.
Barbara Gastel, MD, MPH, Texas A&M University
Evidence-based medicine is literature-based medicine, and the AMA Manual continues to set the standards for preparing the medical literature. The information is relevant, accurate, complete, and accessible, and the writing is clear, organized, and concise.
Tom Lang, MA, Tom Lang Communications and Training International
By presenting its sage advice in language that is accessible without being elementary, punctilious without being pedantic, the AMA Manual has secured its status as an indispensable and preeminent resource for medical writers and editors of every sphere.
Peter J. Olson, ELS, Sheridan Journal Services
The first edition of an editorial manual for the AMA's scientific journals appeared in October 1962; it was 68 pages long and was intended primarily as a guide for in-house staff and, secondarily, for authors. It grew slowly but surely: from 90 pages in the second edition, published in 1963, to more than 154 pages in the sixth edition, published in 1976. These editions were all published by the AMA and continued to be intended primarily for use by the in-house scientific publications staff, although recognition was growing that authors, as well as editors at other publishers, were using the book as a reference. With the seventh edition, published in 1981 and weighing in at 183 pages, this larger audience was recognized by a change in the book's title to Manual for Authors & Editors and, for the first time, the book was published by an outside publisher (Lange Medical Publications).
With the eighth edition began the current approach of having a committee of 10 professional editors from the staff of JAMA and the Archives Journals responsible for the content, obtaining external peer review on all sections. This edition, published as a hardcover book in 1989 by Williams & Wilkins, was 377 pages. The growth in the audience is represented by sales of more than 33,000 copies. The single greatest area of expansion in the eighth edition was nomenclature: coverage grew from about 11 pages in the seventh edition to 54 pages. Glossaries of printing and production terms, as well as a resource bibliography, were added. The ninth edition, published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins in 1998, saw an even greater expansion in pages and sales: 660 pages and more than 44,000 copies. In this edition, the coverage of nomenclature continued to expand (up to 130 pages), but the largest new areas of expansion were in statistics (from 5 to 60 pages) and ethical and legal considerations (from 9 to 85 pages).
In the 10th edition, published in 2007 by Oxford University Press, the book grew substantially, totaling 1032 pages. A chapter on medical indexes was added. The Legal and Ethical Considerations chapter expanded again, from 85 pages to 175 pages; Nomenclature also continued to expand, from 130 to 247 pages. With the split of the chapter on manuscript preparation into 3 chapters, there was greater coverage of references (eg, from 15 to 50 examples of electronic reference citation) and visual presentation of data. Throughout the book, there was an increased international scope and recognition of the changes in the scientific publishing field associated with advances in technology, the internet, and the electronic evolution of writing, editing, and publishing. The index is more detailed (expanded from 19 to 33 pages) and the more detailed running heads were intended to make the book easier to use.
Now in its 11th edition, the AMA Manual of Style has continued to evolve and expand, now up to nearly 1200 pages. The approach was the same: a committee of 10 JAMA Network editorial staff met regularly, researched, wrote, revised, responded to peer reviewers (thanked at the end of individual chapters and in the Acknowledgments), and revised some more. The entire process from first meeting to last galley proof took about 5 years. The 11th edition contains 2 fewer chapters (from 25 in the 10th to 23 in the 11th). After much consideration, the chapter on indexing was removed, owing to the fact that online searching has become fairly sophisticated. We also have combined the chapters on typography and manuscript editing and proofreading into one addressing the technical and aesthetic aspects of editing and publication display.
The organization of the manual has been revised. The 5 “sections” from the 10th edition are no longer; however, the 23 chapters are presented in the same order as in the 10th to provide continuity to long-time users. Content is organized in deeper “chunks” to enable precise location of information for references and in searches, with numerous numbered cross-referenced and linked subsections to the x.x.x.x.x level. Each chapter has been extensively revised and updated to reflect best practices and developments in scientific research, writing, and publishing, with numerous new examples, updated references, and for the first time, full-color graphics.