How to format your references using the Nature Neuroscience citation style

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

Launius, R. D. Neil Armstrong (1930-2012). Nature 489, 368 (2012).

A journal article with 2 authors

de Vernal, A. & Hillaire-Marcel, C. Natural variability of Greenland climate, vegetation, and ice volume during the past million years. Science 320, 1622–1625 (2008).

A journal article with 3 authors

Tellinghuisen, T. L., Marcotrigiano, J. & Rice, C. M. Structure of the zinc-binding domain of an essential component of the hepatitis C virus replicase. Nature 435, 374–379 (2005).

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Miritello, G., Lara, R., Cebrian, M. & Moro, E. Limited communication capacity unveils strategies for human interaction. Sci. Rep. 3, 1950 (2013).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Çapin, T. K., Pandzic, I. S., Magnenat-Thalmann, N. & Thalmann, D. Avatars in Networked Virtual Environments. (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2001).

An edited book

Lost Sex: The Evolutionary Biology of Parthenogenesis. (Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2009).

A chapter in an edited book

Koganemaru, S., Mima, T., Fukuyama, H. & Domen, K. Improvement of Spastic Stroke Hemiparesis Using rTMS Combined with Motor Training. in Systems Neuroscience and Rehabilitation (eds. Kansaku, K. & Cohen, L. G.) 59–68 (Springer Japan, Tokyo, 2011).

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 Neuroscience.

Blog post

Andrew, E. How The Brain Reads Music: The Evidence For Musical Dyslexia. IFLScience https://www.iflscience.com/brain/how-brain-reads-music-evidence-musical-dyslexia/ (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. Puerto Rico: Characteristics of the Island’s Maritime Trade and Potential Effects of Modifying the Jones Act. (2013).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Shearer, J. Application of the recovery model in clinical practice. (California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, 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

Joseph, Y. Passage Home for a Pioneer’s House. New York Times A4 (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 Neuroscience
Abbreviation	Nat. Neurosci.
ISSN (print)	1097-6256
ISSN (online)	1546-1726
Scope	General Neuroscience