How to format your references using the Nucleic Acids Research citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Nucleic Acids Research. 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

1. Ellis,J. (2007) Beyond the standard model with the LHC. Nature, 448, 297–301.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Gavrilets,S. and Losos,J.B. (2009) Adaptive radiation: contrasting theory with data. Science, 323, 732–737.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Thompson,R.J., Zhou,N. and MacVicar,B.A. (2006) Ischemia opens neuronal gap junction hemichannels. Science, 312, 924–927.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

1. Fuchs,S., Rende,E., Crisanti,A. and Nolan,T. (2014) Disruption of aminergic signalling reveals novel compounds with distinct inhibitory effects on mosquito reproduction, locomotor function and survival. Sci. Rep., 4, 5526.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Baldwin,P. (2010) OSx86 Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, USA.

An edited book

1. Tavares,J.M.R.S. and Natal Jorge,R.M. eds. (2015) Computational and Experimental Biomedical Sciences: Methods and Applications: ICCEBS 2013 -- International Conference on Computational and Experimental Biomedical Sciences Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Bishop,W. and Grubesic,T.H. (2016) Policy. In Grubesic,T.H. (ed), Geographic Information: Organization, Access, and Use, Springer Geography. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 53–77.

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 Nucleic Acids Research.

Blog post

1. Hale,T. (2016) China’s Bizarre Traffic-Straddling Bus Has Actually Been Built. IFLScience.

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

1. Government Accountability Office (2009) Higher Education: Factors Lenders Consider in Making Lending Decisions for Private Education Loans U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Adams,A.A. (2009) A study of the attitudes and opinions of southwest Missouri educators regarding the value and outcome of the performance based teacher evaluation process.

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

1. Vecsey,G. (2011) Days of a Dynasty Are Only a Memory For a Distinct Race. New York Times.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses:

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	Nucleic Acids Research
Abbreviation	Nucleic Acids Res.
ISSN (print)	0305-1048
ISSN (online)	1362-4962
Scope	Genetics