How to format your references using the Nature Genetics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Nature Genetics. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Pickup, D. J. Cell biology. Propelling progeny. Science 327, 787–788 (2010).

A journal article with 2 authors

Oganov, A. R. & Ono, S. Theoretical and experimental evidence for a post-perovskite phase of MgSiO3 in Earth’s D" layer. Nature 430, 445–448 (2004).

A journal article with 3 authors

Boots, M., Hudson, P. J. & Sasaki, A. Large shifts in pathogen virulence relate to host population structure. Science 303, 842–844 (2004).

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Glass, J. I. et al. The complete sequence of the mucosal pathogen Ureaplasma urealyticum. Nature 407, 757–762 (2000).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Marlet, R. Program Specialization. (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ USA, 2012).

An edited book

Biscari, P. Meccanica Razionale. vol. 93 (Springer, Milano, 2016).

A chapter in an edited book

Hunton, J. Spaces of Projection Method Patterns and their Cohomology. in Mathematics of Aperiodic Order (eds. Kellendonk, J., Lenz, D. & Savinien, J.) 105–135 (Springer, Basel, 2015).

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 Genetics.

Blog post

Carpineti, A. NASA’s Mission To Metal Asteroid Psyche Will Now Arrive Four Years Earlier. IFLScience (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. Buy America Requirements: Federal Enforcement Questioned in Sacramento Mass Transit Procurement. (1987).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Tabak, S. Aspiring States at the International Court of Justice. (George Washington University, Washington, DC, 2015).

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

St. John Kelly, E. Hasidic Housing a Letdown. New York Times 147 (1998).

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 Genetics
Abbreviation	Nat. Genet.
ISSN (print)	1061-4036
ISSN (online)	1546-1718
Scope	Genetics