AMA Manual of Style

Style guides

ACS Style Guide AMA Manual of Style AP Stylebook APA Style The ASA Style Guide Bluebook Brazilian National Standards Organization The Business Style Handbook The Chicago Manual of Style Citing Medicine The Elements of Style The Elements of Typographic Style Fowler's Modern English Usage IEEE style ISO 690 McGill Guide MHRA Style Guide The Microsoft Manual of Style MLA Handbook The New York Times Manual The Oxford Guide to Style/New Hart's Rules Scientific Style and Format (CSE style) The Sense of Style Turabian: A Manual for Writers List of style guide abbreviations

AMA Manual of Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors is the style guide of the American Medical Association. It is written by the editors of JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) and the Archives journals and is most recently published by Oxford University Press.^[1][2] It specifies the writing and citation styles for use in the journals published by the American Medical Association. The manual was first published in 1962, and its current edition, the 10th, came out in 2007.^[1] It covers a breadth of topics for authors and editors in medicine and related health fields. The online edition also has updates (style points that have changed since the last print edition), a blog, monthly tips from the editors, quizzes, and an SI unit conversion calculator.

AMA style is widely used, either entirely or with modifications, by hundreds of other scientific journals (including medical and other public health journals), in many textbooks, and in academia (for papers written in classes). Along with APA style and CSE style, it is one of the major style regimes for such work. Many publications have small local style guides that cascade over AMA, APA, or CSE style (for example, "follow AMA style unless otherwise specified herein" or "for issues not addressed herein, follow AMA style").

Content areas

• Section 1. Preparing an Article for Publication

1. Types of Articles
2. Manuscript Preparation
3. References
4. Visual Presentation of Data
5. Ethical and Legal Considerations
6. Editorial Assessment and Processing.

• Section 2. Style

1. Grammar,
2. Punctuation,
3. Plurals,
4. Capitalization,
5. Correct and Preferred Usage,
6. Non-English Words, Phrases, and Accent Marks,
7. Medical Indexes;

• Section 3. Terminology

1. Abbreviations,
2. Nomenclature,
3. Eponyms,
4. Greek Letters;

• Section 4. Measurement and Quantitation

1. Units of Measure,
2. Numbers and Percentages,
3. Study Design and Statistics,
4. Mathematical Composition;

• Section 5. Technical Information

1. Typography,
2. Manuscript Editing and Proofreading,
3. Glossary of Publishing Terms,
4. Resources.

Traits of AMA style

In general, AMA style strives for clarity and simplicity, and trusts the target readership to have a certain amount of knowledge and education. For example, AMA style dispenses with periods in abbreviations, on the grounds that they are unnecessary for meaning's or clarity's sake in all but very few contexts. AMA also requires expansion of most abbreviations at first use, for clarity's sake. The AMA Manual of Style sets standards for mechanical style, but does not insist on invariability for its own sake in contexts where a bit of limited variation is logical, especially in higher-level style.

References