How to Cite a Clinical Practice Guideline

Clinical practice guidelines sit between a report and a standard. They have a corporate author, a version number and an update history, and they are revised as the evidence changes. That last point is what most references get wrong: a guideline citation without a version date can point a reader at advice that has since been withdrawn.

Three real guidelines are used below, each checked against the issuing body's own page on 22 September 2026:

• NICE NG28, Type 2 diabetes in adults: management, published 2 December 2015, last updated 18 February 2026.
• USPSTF, "Colorectal Cancer: Screening", final recommendation statement dated 18 May 2021, published as Screening for Colorectal Cancer: US Preventive Services Task Force Recommendation Statement, JAMA, 325(19), 1965, DOI 10.1001/jama.2021.6238.
• WHO, Global report on neglected tropical diseases (2025), which is the group-author report example in APA's own published handout.

What to Collect

• The issuing organisation, in full
• The guideline title, exactly as published
• The guideline number or identifier
• The year of the version you used, and the original publication year if different
• The publisher, if different from the author
• The URL, and for the journal version, the DOI

Quick Reference by Major Style

APA (7th Edition)

APA treats a guideline as a report by a group author. The template below is the one the University of Queensland Library publishes for government and organisational reports; APA's own handout uses the same shape for its WHO example.

In-text: first mention, (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence [NICE], 2026); afterwards, (NICE, 2026). UQ's guide sets out that abbreviation rule: give the full name with the abbreviation in square brackets the first time, use the abbreviation after that, and use the full name in the reference list.

APA's own group-author report example, quoted from its Common Reference Examples handout:

When the guideline was published in a journal, cite it as a journal article instead:

Vancouver and AMA

The numbered health-sciences styles put the organisation where an author would go, or drop the author entirely when the organisation is obvious from the source. The template below is the one the University of Queensland Library publishes in its Vancouver/AMA guide for reports and documents.

That guide notes that where the report is authored by an organisation, the author may be omitted from the front of the reference, and that you can add detail to identify an organisation — "Productivity Commission, Australian Government", for example.

The journal version of a recommendation statement is cited as an article:

Check the target journal's instructions to authors before submission; house styles differ on whether the organisation is repeated and on how updates are shown. See the Vancouver guide and the AMA guide.

Harvard (Cite Them Right)

The University of Sheffield's Harvard guide, which states that it follows Cite Them Right (10th rev. and expanded edn), publishes a Clinical Guidelines entry, so there is no need to adapt anything here. Its online form is:

Sheffield's own worked examples under that heading are NICE (2015) Obesity in children and young people: prevention and lifestyle weight management programmes. QS94. Available at: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qs94 (Accessed: 4 August 2017). and a British Society of Gastroenterology guideline. The same form applied to the guideline verified for this page:

For a printed guideline the guide swaps the availability statement for a place and publisher: Corporate Author (Year of publication) Title of Guideline. Reference Number (if given). Place of publication: Publisher.

In-text: (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), 2026), then (NICE, 2026). That abbreviation rule is stated in the same section's notes, using NICE as the example.

MLA (9th Edition)

MLA builds the entry from the template of core elements. The issuing body is the author when it is not also the publisher; where author and publisher are the same, MLA's rule is to begin with the title and list the organisation only as publisher.

In-text: (Type 2 Diabetes)

Chicago (18th Edition)

The Chicago Manual of Style is subscription-only and its free Citation Quick Guide has no guideline entry. Treat the guideline as an organisational report and follow the pattern your department names; the elements are organisation, title, guideline number, version year and URL.

Missing Elements

No guideline number. Some bodies do not use one. Give the title and the version date instead.

No update date. Use the publication date and say you checked the page on a given date.

A guideline in draft or consultation. Say so explicitly. Draft recommendations change.

A withdrawn guideline. Cite it and note the withdrawal and what replaced it. Withdrawn guidelines are legitimate sources for work about how practice changed.

A local protocol. Internal hospital or trust documents are unpublished material. Use a bracketed template — [Name of Trust], [Title of protocol], [version], [date] — rather than presenting them as published sources, and check your institution's rules before quoting.

Common Mistakes

• Citing the original publication year of a guideline that has since been substantially updated
• Dropping the guideline number, which is how clinicians locate it
• Citing a secondary summary — a news article, a slide deck, a UpToDate entry — as though it were the guideline
• Citing the guideline for a finding that belongs to one of the studies behind it
• Using an organisation's abbreviation in the reference list, where the full name belongs
• Citing a national guideline as though it applied in another country's system
• Forgetting that USPSTF, NICE and WHO documents often exist in both a web version and a journal version, with different citable details

Sources for These Formats

• American Psychological Association, APA Style common reference examples guide (7th ed. handout, last updated 3 March 2026), Report by a Group Author section
• University of Queensland Library, "APA 7th referencing style: Report" and "Vancouver/AMA referencing style: Reports"
• University of Sheffield Library, "Harvard referencing" (based on Cite Them Right, 10th rev. and expanded edn), "Clinical Guidelines" entry and its corporate-author abbreviation notes
• MLA Handbook, 9th ed., template of core elements; MLA Style Center on organisations as authors
• NICE guideline page for NG28; USPSTF final recommendation statement page for colorectal cancer screening; Crossref record for DOI 10.1001/jama.2021.6238

Full style rules: Vancouver, AMA, APA, Harvard, MLA, Chicago.

A guideline is a report with a group author, which the citation generator does handle: choose the report type, put the organisation in the author field as a single name, and put the guideline number in the number field.