How to format your references using the Nature Geoscience citation style

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

Eisenstein, M. Medicine: Eyes on the target. Nature 527, S110-2 (2015).

A journal article with 2 authors

Prospero, J. M. & Lamb, P. J. African droughts and dust transport to the Caribbean: climate change implications. Science 302, 1024–1027 (2003).

A journal article with 3 authors

Gitlin, A. D., Shulman, Z. & Nussenzweig, M. C. Clonal selection in the germinal centre by regulated proliferation and hypermutation. Nature 509, 637–640 (2014).

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Chen, T. Y., Tesanovic, Z., Liu, R. H., Chen, X. H. & Chien, C. L. A BCS-like gap in the superconductor SmFeAsO0.85F0.15. Nature 453, 1224–1227 (2008).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Robinson, M. D. An Employer’s and Engineer’s Guide to the FIDIC Conditions of Contract. (John Wiley & Sons, 2013).

An edited book

Transformative Approaches to New Technologies and Student Diversity in Futures Oriented Classrooms: Future Proofing Education. (Springer Netherlands, 2012).

A chapter in an edited book

Carey, F. A. & Sundberg, R. J. Nucleophilic Substitution. in Advanced Organic Chemistry: Part A: Structure and Mechanisms (ed. Sundberg, R. J.) 389–472 (Springer US, 2007).

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 Geoscience.

Blog post

Evans, K. ‘The Hare Psychopathy Checklist’: The Test That Will Tell You If Someone Is A Sociopath. IFLScience (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. Use of Corps Electronic Signature System. (1994).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Hong, H. J. Acrolein Modification of Human Apolipoprotein A-I Impairs Binding to Phosphatidylglycerol and Lipopolysaccharide of Gram-Negative Bacteria. (California State University, Long Beach, 2017).

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

Gates, A. One Despicable, Another Disdainful. New York Times CT10 (2013).

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 Geoscience
Abbreviation	Nat. Geosci.
ISSN (print)	1752-0894
ISSN (online)	1752-0908
Scope	General Earth and Planetary Sciences