VCS 7495: Grand Rounds

Most style manuals are written with papers and research articles in mind--not PowerPoint presentations. Thus, they do not specify how to format and style presentation slides. For your Grand Rounds presentations, the following guidelines are recommended if you decide to use AMA style for your presentation. These tips are based on the AMA Manual of Style, 11th edition. Remember, it is not important which style you choose (APA or AMA) for this presentation, just consistently use the same style throughout.

Some things to note about AMA citations:

• Author names only include first and middle initials and there is no punctuation between elements of a name, only a comma separating each author name; author names are in format Author AA, Author BB., etc.
• For article titles, only the first letter of the first word of the title is capitalized. Exceptions to this rule are for proper names, abbreviations that are ordinally capitalized, and names of clinical trials or study groups. See Section 3.9 of the AMA Manual of Style (11th ed.) for more details.
• The journal title is abbreviated using the version in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) NLM Catalog database. Use this link to search for the journal you need to find an abbreviation for.
• Include a DOI if one is available. Every DOI begins with https://doi.org/. If the article does not have a DOI then a URL is acceptable. Depending on the online resource, it may be important to include date of last update and date you accessed the resource as well.

At the end of your presentation there should be a reference list. This list should include a complete citation for every resource that you cited in your presentation. The following are some of the guidelines for reference lists included in the 11th edition of the AMA Manual of Style.

• References are numbered and listed in numerical order based on their first usage in the presentation.
• Journal titles are Italicized and abbreviated based on the listing in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) NLM Catalog database.

It is not necessary to include a full citation in the body of your presentation when using AMA. Simply identify the cited information with a superscript Arabic numeral in the text as in the example below.

Mutsaers et al. state that dogs with transitional cell carcinoma are useful models for humans with invasive bladder cancer.²

The citations should be ordered numerically as they first appear in the presentation. See Section 3.6 of the AMA Manual of Style, 11th ed., for more details. The following entry would appear in the list of references at the end of the presentation for the citation above.

2. Mutsaers AJ, Widmer WR, Knapp DW. Canine transitional cell carcinoma. J Vet Intermal Med. 2003;17(2):136-144. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-1676.2003.tb02424.x

Citations for images and figures used in your presentation that were taken from other sources are easy to cite. A superscript Arabic numeral should be used to identify the cited material and direct readers to the full citation in the reference list--just like any other cited source. Note that images sourced from PowerPoint clipart or images/charts/graphs you create do not need a citation though other public domain images and images with Creative Commons licenses should.

Figure 1. Image of a dog wearing a recovery cone³

The full citation that would appear in your references list would be:

3. Du Preez P. Black pug wearing recovery cone. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/2hc6ocDAsNY. Published September 6, 2020. Accessed May 3, 2021.

Note that this image did not have a given title so a title describing the image was created. If the image is from an online source then create the full citation as if it were a website.

For additional examples and tutorials, see the AMA Style Guide from the George Washington University medical library.

The ISU Library supports several bibliographic management tools. These tools are very helpful in organizing your citations and preparing reference lists. The following guides can help you learn how to use these tools.

• Mendeley Guide
• EndNote and EndNote Web Guide
• Zotero Guide

Many databases, library catalogs, citation software, and other online services provide options to automatically generate citations for you. These can be useful tools in preparing your list of references. However, it is important to review each reference generated in this manner to ensure that it includes the correct information and that it is properly formatted.