Nature reference format

What Nature expects

• Reference style: Numbered sequentially as cited in the text, tables, boxes, figure legends and Methods. In-text numbers are superscript, not in brackets.
• Authors: Surname first, then initials. All authors are listed unless there are more than five, in which case only the first is given, followed by et al.
• Titles and journals: Article titles are required, in upright text. Journal titles are italic and abbreviated; volume numbers are bold.
• Number of references: As a guideline, up to 50 in the main text. Methods and Supplementary Information references are not counted.
• Manuscript format: Word is preferred. A TeX/LaTeX manuscript is converted to Word after acceptance, and all text, including references, should be in a single .tex file.
• Length: A typical 6-page Article is about 2,500 words; an 8-page Article about 4,300. The summary paragraph is ideally no more than 200 words.

Setting up the bibliography

Nature's formatting guide names no .bst file. Springer Nature's general LaTeX template does include a Nature reference style, selected as a class option:

\documentclass[pdflatex,sn-nature]{sn-jnl}
...
\bibliography{refs}

The template comments describe sn-nature as the “style for submissions to Nature Portfolio journals”, and the zip contains sn-nature.bst. Nature asks for all text, references included, in a single .tex file, so our suggestion is to paste the generated .bbl contents into the manuscript before you send it.

Three references in sn-nature.bst

1. Watson, J. D. & Crick, F. H. C. Molecular structure of nucleic acids: A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. Nature 171, 737–738 (1953). https://doi.org/10.1038/171737a0
2. LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y. & Hinton, G. Deep learning. Nature 521, 436–444 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539
3. Jumper, J. et al. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Nature 596, 583–589 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2

Three Nature papers in citation order, produced by running sn-nature.bst over a .bib file built from the Crossref record for each DOI. The third paper has 34 authors, so it is shortened to the first author and et al. The style does not print DOIs for journal articles; the link is added here for checking. Titles, authors, volumes and pages were checked against Crossref on 2026-10-01.

LaTeX template

Nature has no journal-specific LaTeX class. The Springer Nature LaTeX authoring template (sn-jnl.cls) is the publisher's general template and is also on Overleaf. We do not have a template page for it yet.

Common mistakes

• Bracketed citation numbers. Nature uses superscripts unless a number could be confused with a superscript value.
• Listing six or more authors in full. Past five, give the first author and et al.
• Leaving out article titles. The guide says titles of all cited articles are required.
• Passing 50 main-text references. Move method-specific citations to the Methods reference list, which continues the numbering and is not counted.
• More than one publication under a single number. The guide allows one per number.

Check your .bib file

• BibTeX Validator (free) checks a .bib file for syntax errors and missing required fields.
• Citation Generator (free) builds IEEE, APA, MLA and Chicago citations from entry fields, in your browser.
• Reference Converter (free) converts between BibTeX, RIS and EndNote. The same converter is below.
• Paper Review with the Journal Pack checks a manuscript against the submission rules of 25 venues, Nature among them.