Who says you must cite Matlab? Strange...

Matlab is just a programming tool. Do you also need to cite the operating system or the brand of pocket calculator used?

Maybe look for a journal with more capable reviewers! Or maybe don't mention Matlab at all in your paper; you might just as well have used Octave or have written your own C code.

How to write your reference list and bibliography in the Vancouver style

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/library/learning-support/reference-management/vancouver-style/your-reference-list/

Some studies or algorithms designed using matlab would report its the version, or the toolbox, or the platform, while it is not common to CITE matlab. It is more like this "...the algorithm is implemented on Matlab (version or company) ..."

Lambert Zijp Anton Vrdoljak Nicolas Yu Thank you very much for your suggestion. i really appreciate the time you took to think about it and i find it to be very helpful. i found many links showing the citation of Matlab but for toolboxes, on the other hand some manual references are suggested as mentioned by Anton Vrdoljak whereas reporting version is also enough as mentioned by Nicolas Yu . certainly grateful for your recommendations

There exist different opinions on whether software should be included in the list of references. I often do include it, especially when I cannot assume the typical reader to know the software or when the exact version is particularly important. In the list of references, an entry for a program typically looks something like

[1] The Mathworks Inc., Matlab, R2015b [computer program], 2015

Hauke Gravenkamp , is it your experience that if you would have used a different version, that then your experimental results would be significantly different?

I mean, the goal of the "materials & methods" section is reproducibility.

I grant you that if algorithms become more 'vague' (e.g. machine learning), stating software versions is indeed a good idea, but somehow it seems bad science to me...