Official journal title abbreviations for Index Medicus (now part of MEDLINE) are maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). These standardized abbreviations are required for many medical citation styles, including AMA and Vancouver. Where to Find Abbreviations
NLM Catalog: The primary tool for looking up official abbreviations. You can search by full journal title, ISSN, or existing abbreviation in the NLM Catalog for Journals.
Citing Medicine: The NLM style guide, Citing Medicine, provides the specific rules used to construct these abbreviations if a title is not found in the catalog.
PubMed Search Builder: When searching for journals in the NLM Catalog, adding a journal to the "Search Builder" will automatically display its standard abbreviation. General Abbreviation Rules
If you cannot find a journal in the official catalog, NLM follows these general principles for constructing abbreviations:
Significant Words: Capitalize and abbreviate significant words while omitting articles, conjunctions, and prepositions (e.g., "of," "the," "and").
No Punctuation: Standard NLM abbreviations typically do not use periods after abbreviated words (e.g., Journal of Medicine becomes J Med, not J. Med.). Official journal title abbreviations for Index Medicus (now
One-Word Titles: Journals with single-word titles (e.g., Pediatrics, Circulation) are usually not abbreviated.
Consistency: Use the Appendix A of Citing Medicine for a list of common English word abbreviations used in titles. Integration with Reference Software
Most reference managers can automatically apply these abbreviations:
Authors’ Instructions | Saratov Journal of Medical Scientific Research
To understand the abbreviations, one must first understand the catalog. Before PubMed, before the internet, there was the Index Medicus.
Founded in 1879 by John Shaw Billings, librarian of the Surgeon General’s Office of the U.S. Army, the Index Medicus was a monthly classified record of the current medical literature of the world. It was, in essence, Google printed on paper. Every month, librarians and physicians would scan hundreds of international journals, extract the citations, and organize them by subject and author. Part I: The Genesis of Index Medicus To
Imagine the sheer volume: by the mid-20th century, the Index Medicus was compiling hundreds of thousands of citations annually. Space was at a premium. Printing full journal titles—e.g., The New England Journal of Medicine—repeatedly would have wasted pages, ink, and the user’s time.
Thus, the practical abbreviation was born. The New England Journal of Medicine became N Engl J Med. The Journal of the American Medical Association became JAMA. These shortened forms were not just nicknames; they were a rigorous bibliographic code designed for rapid scanning and consistency.
For over a century (until its final print edition in 2004), the Index Medicus was the bible of biomedical bibliography. Its abbreviation conventions became the de facto standard for the entire medical field.
While one could attempt to guess the abbreviation using ISO rules, guessing is dangerous. The NLM maintains a definitive database called LocatorPlus, and more accessibly, the NCBI NLM Catalog.
Here is a comparison of how high-impact medical journals are abbreviated in the NLM style.
| Full Journal Title | NLM / Index Medicus Abbreviation | | :--- | :--- | | The New England Journal of Medicine | N Engl J Med | | The Lancet | Lancet | | Journal of the American Medical Association | JAMA | | British Medical Journal | BMJ | | Journal of Clinical Investigation | J Clin Invest | | Nature Medicine | Nat Med | | Annals of Internal Medicine | Ann Intern Med | | Archives of Internal Medicine | Arch Intern Med (Now JAMA Intern Med) | | PLOS One | PLoS One | | Cancer Research | Cancer Res | | Pediatrics | Pediatrics (Single word = No abbreviation) | How to Find the Correct Abbreviation While one
In 1956, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) was established by law, transferring the collections and responsibilities of the Armed Forces Medical Library. The NLM inherited the Index Medicus and, crucially, its abbreviation system.
Today, the NLM is the world’s largest biomedical library. As the publisher of Index Medicus and now the creator of PubMed and MEDLINE, the NLM holds the ultimate authority over journal title abbreviations in the life sciences.
When the NLM transitioned to digital databases in the 1960s and 1970s (developing MEDLINE, or "Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online"), they needed a standardized, machine-readable list. They created the NLM Catalog, which includes over 140,000 journals, and each one is assigned a unique NLM Title Abbreviation.
If you are writing a manuscript for a medical journal, submitting a thesis, or building a database, the rule is simple: Use the NLM abbreviation. Not the abbreviation from ISO (International Organization for Standardization), not a guess, not the abbreviation from a competing publisher. The NLM is the gold standard.
The official repository for these abbreviations is LocatorPlus, the NLM’s online catalog, and specifically the NLM Catalog of journals. Here, you can search for a journal title and find its official abbreviated form. For example:
| Full journal title | NLM abbreviation | |-------------------|------------------| | New England Journal of Medicine | N Engl J Med | | Journal of the American Medical Association | JAMA (exception) | | The Lancet | Lancet | | Nature | Nature | | Science | Science | | Cell | Cell | | BMJ (Clinical research ed.) | BMJ | | PLoS ONE | PLoS One |