[Tex/LaTex] How to use vancouver citation style with biber/biblatex

biberbiblatexciting

i know how to use the vancouver citation style with bibtex, but i use biber in my project, but i don't know how to use the vancouver citation style there?

i configured my tex file like this and added my bib file:

\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex}

\addbibresource{bibliography.bib}

I tried it with the commands but did not work:

style=vancouver 
citestyle=vancouver 

I got only an error that the \cite command is not defined. So it seems that the citation style could not be found or loaded. So can someone help me to get the vancouver style working?

Thanks!

Best Answer

The term "Vancouver style" or "Vancouver system" seems to be slightly more variable than say, APA style or Chicago style. Often institutions have their own modifications to the general idea of the style. (Much like "Harvard style" often just means an author year style.)

According to Wikipedia the home of the "official Vancouver style" is the NLM's Citing Medicine.

From what I can see there, it is essentially a numerical style.

For BibTeX there is vancouver.bst.

For biblatex a quick search on the web only turned up https://github.com/fluffels/biblatex-vancouver, the styles there haven't been updated in years though and the redefinitions of the drivers are indeed quite rough. See also Vancouver citation style in LaTex.

I think your best bet with biblatex is to start from a numeric style and modify it as needed. One prominent feature is the name format which can be reproduced with terseinits=true, firstinits=true and

\DeclareNameAlias{default}{last-first}
\renewcommand*{\revsdnamepunct}{}

As Johannes_B points out in the comments, there is Biblatex style file for New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) which lead to biblatex-nejm. And indeed what Marco Daniel implements there seems quite close to the Vancouver style requirements linked to above.

The package has been last updated in November 2011 though, and so some of the code might not work that smoothly. From what I could see most of it is still absolutely the right code for the job. The \renewbibmacro*{name:last-first} block, however, can be replaced by the code above.

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