How to format your references using the Nature Immunology citation style

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

Witze, A. Meteorology: California study targets rivers in the sky. Nature 517, 424–425 (2015).

A journal article with 2 authors

Blatt, R. & Wineland, D. Entangled states of trapped atomic ions. Nature 453, 1008–1015 (2008).

A journal article with 3 authors

Bailes, F., Dean, R. T. & Pearce, M. T. Music cognition as mental time travel. Sci. Rep. 3, 2690 (2013).

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Dou, D. et al. Novel selective and irreversible mosquito acetylcholinesterase inhibitors for controlling malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases. Sci. Rep. 3, 1068 (2013).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hoskins, B. J. & James, I. N. Fluid Dynamics of the Midlatitude Atmosphere. (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2014).

An edited book

Recent Advances in Modeling Landslides and Debris Flows. (Springer International Publishing, 2015).

A chapter in an edited book

Choi, Y.-K., Kim, C.-H., Ahn, J.-H., Kim, J.-Y. & Kim, S. Dielectric Detection Using Biochemical Assays. in Point-of-Care Diagnostics on a Chip (eds. Issadore, D. & Westervelt, R. M.) 97–123 (Springer, 2013).

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 Immunology.

Blog post

Hamilton, K. The CDC Mapped Out Where People With Cancer Live In The US – Here’s What It Found. IFLScience https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/the-cdc-mapped-out-where-people-with-cancer-live-in-the-us-heres-what-it-found/ (2017).

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. Electronic Government: Selected Agency Plans for Implementing the Government Paperwork Elimination Act. (2001).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Ramberg, K. S. L’envers et l’endroit: The other side of the cloth. (Pacifica Graduate Institute, 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

Brantley, B. This Means Something, as Well as Something Else. New York Times C1 (2016).

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 Immunology
Abbreviation	Nat. Immunol.
ISSN (print)	1529-2908
ISSN (online)	1529-2916
Scope	Immunology

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