Vancouver
Every CitationLab post tagged vancouver. This topic runs through several posts across the blog — case files where it caused a real problem, and guides for handling it in your own reference list.
'Nelson SD, W.' — anatomy of a mangled author
Vancouver author lists read under APA grammar produce names no human has. How 'Nelson SD, Wong PT' becomes 'Nelson SD, W.', why a wrong parse is worse than no parse, and when a checker should refuse to guess.
How to tell what citation style your thesis uses
Your thesis probably does not have one style. Identify the shape of each citation instead — six forms, decidable from the surface — and diagnose your own document in ten minutes.
The APA default that broke every Vancouver thesis
Most citation tools silently assume author–date referencing. Here is what that default does to a numbered Vancouver thesis — including the weeks our own system detected the style, then threw the answer away.
The checker said 90% of my citations failed. The checker was wrong.
A doctoral thesis was told 90% of its citations were missing. The real defect was one broken assumption — and the true error count was two. How to read a failure report before you panic.