This is the Vancouver style for referencing, used at the Univerity of Portsmouth within the School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences and the Radiography departments.

This guide is modelled on Citing Medicine: The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (2nd edition). You may wish to consult this source directly for additional information or examples.

How do I incorporate tables and figures into my assignment?

  • Copy the table or figure exactly as found in the original source, unless you need to adapt it.  
  • Number tables/figures consecutively in Arabic numerals (Table 1, Table 2, Figure 1, Figure 2 etc) as they appear in your assignment/dissertation - do not use the table/figure numbers given in the original work(s).  
  • Table and figure titles can be located either above or below the table or figure, but keep it consistent in your work.  
  • Acknowledge the original source in the caption or notes directly underneath the table/figure.  
  • Captions should be capitalised in sentence style.  
  • Add credit lines as required by the copyright holder. Copyright holder may be the publisher, author/s or artists.

 

Refer to the figure or table by the figure or table number and tell your reader what to look out for, e.g. “The image in Figure 2 shows the structure of the gastrointestinal membrane in relation to extracellular fluid” or “Table 1 illustrates that 86% of radiology students believe that radiology has an important role in diagnosing COVID-19”.  

 

To see examples of tables and figures incorporated into assignments, please click 'more' below.

 

more

The following shows an example for a table taken from an online journal article. 

Table from online journal article

Note the superscript 1 in the above example is your in-text citation number, and signposts the reader to item number 1 on your Reference list (see the end of this guide for the full reference list). 

 

The following shows an example for a figure taken from an online journal article. 

Figure from an online journal

The following shows an example for a figure taken from an electronic book. 

Figure from an electronic book

Note the superscript 2 and superscript 3 in the figure examples given above are your in-text citation numbers, and signpost the reader to item numbers 2 and 3 on your reference list (see the end of this guide for the full reference list).