This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Nature Communications. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.
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. |
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.