How to format your references using the Nature Biotechnology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Nature Biotechnology. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Download the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

Hovers, E. Archaeology: Tools go back in time. Nature 521, 294–295 (2015).

A journal article with 2 authors

Trottier, Y. & Mandel, J. L. Biomedicine. Huntingtin--profit and loss. Science 293, 445–446 (2001).

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhou, J., Thompson, B. & Hess, R. F. A new form of rapid binocular plasticity in adult with amblyopia. Sci. Rep. 3, 2638 (2013).

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Reganold, J. P., Glover, J. D., Andrews, P. K. & Hinman, H. R. Sustainability of three apple production systems. Nature 410, 926–930 (2001).

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Castle, D., Cline, C., Daar, A. S., Tsamis, C. & Singer, P. A. Science, Society, and the Supermarket. (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2006).

An edited book

CONCUR 2011 – Concurrency Theory: 22nd International Conference, CONCUR 2011, Aachen, Germany, September 6-9, 2011. Proceedings. vol. 6901 (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011).

A chapter in an edited book

Breitenmoser, A. & Martinoli, A. On Combining Multi-robot Coverage and Reciprocal Collision Avoidance. in Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems: The 12th International Symposium (eds. Chong, N.-Y. & Cho, Y.-J.) 49–64 (Springer Japan, Tokyo, 2016).

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Nature Biotechnology.

Blog post

Andrews, R. Something Just Put A Dent In One Of Saturn’s Rings. IFLScience https://www.iflscience.com/space/something-just-put-a-dent-in-one-of-saturns-rings/ (2016).

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office. Graduate Medical Education: Trends in Training and Student Debt. (2009).

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Newsom, S. M. Love and Creativity: A Shared Dynamic. (Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, CA, 2012).

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Qiu, L. Misleading Statements From President’s Cabinet. New York Times A13 (2017).

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

This sentence cites one reference ¹.
This sentence cites two references ^1,2.
This sentence cites four references ^1–4.

About the journal

Full journal title	Nature Biotechnology
Abbreviation	Nat. Biotechnol.
ISSN (print)	1087-0156
ISSN (online)	1546-1696
Scope	Biotechnology Molecular Medicine Bioengineering Biomedical Engineering Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology