How to format your references using the Nature citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Nature. 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

Rowlett, P. The unplanned impact of mathematics. Nature 475, 166–169 (2011).

A journal article with 2 authors

Rowe, C. & Healy, S. D. Evolution. Is bigger always better? Science 333, 708–709 (2011).

A journal article with 3 authors

Aubert, J., Finlay, C. C. & Fournier, A. Bottom-up control of geomagnetic secular variation by the Earth’s inner core. Nature 502, 219–223 (2013).

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Dang, S. et al. Cryo-EM structures of the TMEM16A calcium-activated chloride channel. Nature 552, 426–429 (2017).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Fiske, J. R. & Fiske, C. A. The Big Book of Benefit Auctions. (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009).

An edited book

Computer Vision - ECCV 2014 Workshops: Zurich, Switzerland, September 6-7 and 12, 2014, Proceedings, Part I. vol. 8925 (Springer International Publishing, 2015).

A chapter in an edited book

Timmis, J., Andrews, P., Owens, N. & Clark, E. Immune Systems and Computation: An Interdisciplinary Adventure. in Unconventional Computing: 7th International Conference, UC 2008 Vienna, Austria, August 25-28, 2008. Proceedings (eds. Calude, C. S., Costa, J. F., Freund, R., Oswald, M. & Rozenberg, G.) 8–18 (Springer, 2008).

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.

Blog post

Hamilton, K. Dog Wearing GoPro Is Attacked By Wolves. IFLScience https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/dog-wearing-gopro-captures-wolves-attacking-it/ (2015).

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. A Look at NASA’s Aircraft Energy Efficiency Program. (1980).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

McCahill, T. P. Teacher perceptions of response to intervention for English learners. (Florida Atlantic University, 2014).

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

Kanter, J. As E.U.’s Roster Swells, So Does Linguistic Burden. New York Times A7 (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
Abbreviation	Nature
ISSN (print)	0028-0836
ISSN (online)	1476-4687
Scope	Multidisciplinary