How to format your references using the Nature Protocols citation style

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

Paddock, S. Tech.Sight. Optical sectioning--slices of life. Science 295, 1319–1321 (2002).

A journal article with 2 authors

Nielsen, T. A. & Stenstrom, P. What are the memory sources of dreaming? Nature 437, 1286–1289 (2005).

A journal article with 3 authors

Klaholz, B. P., Myasnikov, A. G. & Van Heel, M. Visualization of release factor 3 on the ribosome during termination of protein synthesis. Nature 427, 862–865 (2004).

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Endres, M. et al. Observation of correlated particle-hole pairs and string order in low-dimensional Mott insulators. Science 334, 200–203 (2011).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bayuk, J. L. et al. Cyber Security Policy Guidebook. (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2012).

An edited book

Branched Chain Amino Acids in Clinical Nutrition: Volume 1. (Springer, New York, NY, 2015).

A chapter in an edited book

Ramón-Vigo, R., Pérez-Higueras, N., Caballero, F. & Merino, L. A Framework for Modelling Local Human-Robot Interactions Based on Unsupervised Learning. in Social Robotics: 8th International Conference, ICSR 2016, Kansas City, MO, USA, November 1-3, 2016 Proceedings (eds. Agah, A., Cabibihan, J.-J., Howard, A. M., Salichs, M. A. & He, H.) 32–41 (Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016).

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 Protocols.

Blog post

Andrew, E. Once Again, Scientists Conclude That There’s No Evidence That Homeopathy Works. IFLScience https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/there-enough-evidence-practise-homeopathy-alongside-medicine/ (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. Air Traffic Control: Status of FAA’s Implementation of the Display System Replacement Project. (1999).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Watson, K. L. Putting together the pieces of a social cognition deficit: A retrospective case study. (California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, 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

de la MERCED, M. J. Northrop Grumman to Buy Orbital ATK for $7.8 Billion. New York Times B4 (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 Protocols
Abbreviation	Nat. Protoc.
ISSN (print)	1754-2189
ISSN (online)	1750-2799
Scope	General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology