How to format your references using the Nature Climate Change citation style

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

Goldston, D. America’s new leadership. Nature 456, 16 (2008).

A journal article with 2 authors

Schink, B. & Friedrich, M. Phosphite oxidation by sulphate reduction. Nature 406, 37 (2000).

A journal article with 3 authors

Nishimura, E. K., Granter, S. R. & Fisher, D. E. Mechanisms of hair graying: incomplete melanocyte stem cell maintenance in the niche. Science 307, 720–724 (2005).

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Okamoto, R. et al. An entanglement filter. Science 323, 483–485 (2009).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Mastro, P. F. Plastics Product Design. (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2016).

An edited book

The Semanic Web: Research and Applications: 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2011, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, May 29 – June 2, 2011, Proceedings, Part II. vol. 6644 (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011).

A chapter in an edited book

Yang, L., Zhu, Y., Ren, X. & Zhang, Y. Multi-Spacecraft Coordinated Planning. in On-Orbit Operations Optimization: Modeling and Algorithms (eds. Zhu, Y., Ren, X. & Zhang, Y.) 91–112 (Springer, New York, NY, 2014).

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 Climate Change.

Blog post

Taub, B. This Drug Reverses The Effects of Opioid Overdoses. IFLScience https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/drug-reverses-effects-opioid-overdoses/ (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. Medicaid Managed Care: Serving the Disabled Challenges State Programs. (1996).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Hall, K. N. Facilitating physically active identity development in older women. (University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 2010).

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

Paulson, M. Amy Schumer to Make Her Broadway Debut. New York Times C3 (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 Climate Change
Abbreviation	Nat. Clim. Chang.
ISSN (print)	1758-678X
ISSN (online)	1758-6798
Scope	Environmental Science (miscellaneous) Social Sciences (miscellaneous)