Format and style instructions for Nature

1.  Articles are original reports whose conclusions represent a substantial advance in understanding of an important problem and are of broad general interest. They do not normally exceed 5 pages of Nature and have no more than 50 references. (One page of undiluted text is about 1,300 words.)

They have an unreferenced summary, separate from the main text, of up to 150 words, which does not contain numbers, abbreviations or measurements unless essential. Like the opening paragraph of a Letter to Nature, this summary contains a brief account of the background and rationale of the work, followed by a statement of the main conclusions introduced by the phrase ‘Here we show’ or its equivalent.

The article itself begins with up to 500 words of referenced text expanding on the background to the work (some overlap with the summary is acceptable), before proceeding to a concise, focused account of the findings, ending with one or two short paragraphs of discussion. A few subheadings of no more than 40 characters each should be included.

2. Readability Nature is an international journal covering all the sciences. Contributions should therefore be written clearly and simply so that they are accessible to readers in other disciplines and to readers for whom English is not their first language.

• Essential but specialized terms should be explained concisely but not didactically.

• It is often useful to ask colleagues specializing in other disciplines to comment on the clarity of a final draft before submission to Nature.

• Nature’s editors provide detailed advice about format before contributions are formally accepted for publication. Papers are often shortened before acceptance; Nature’s editors frequently suggest revised titles and rewrite the summaries of Articles and first paragraphs of Letters.

• After acceptance, Nature’s subeditors ensure that the text and figures are readable and clear to those outside the field, and edit papers into Nature’s house style.

Contributors are sent proofs and are welcome to discuss proposed changes with Nature’s editors, but Nature reserves the right to make the final decision about matters of style and the size of figures.

3. Format of Articles and Letters. Contributions should be presented in the sequence: title, text, methods, references, acknowledgements, tables, figure legends, figures. Contributors should refer to recent issues of Nature for details of format, and use the guidelines below.

• Titles should not exceed three lines of 30 characters each (including spaces), and should not normally include numbers, acronyms, abbreviations or punctuation (other than a colon if essential).
  

• Text. Length limits are specified in terms of the number of pages in Nature. An uninterrupted page of text contains about 1,300 words, so a typical Letter to Nature, occupying 2.5 pages, contains about 1,500 words of text (including the first paragraph of Letters but excluding figure legends and the methods section if applicable) and four small display items (figures and/or tables) with brief legends. 
  

• An MS Word template may be downloaded from the Nature website. We prefer authors to use this when preparing their manuscript.
  

•  Methods. If the details are brief, they can be given in the text with a reference to published methods used. Otherwise, they should be described at the end of the text in a ‘Methods’ section, subdivided by short, bold headings referring to methods used. This section should not normally exceed 800 words and should ideally be shorter.
  

• Acknowledgements are brief and follow the reference list. 
  

•  References are numbered sequentially as they appear in the text, tables and figure legends.

  • When cited in the text, reference numbers are superscript, not in brackets.

  • The maximum number of references is 50 for Articles and 30 for Letters. Only one publication is given for each number.

  • Only papers that have been published or submitted to a named publication should be in the numbered list; papers in preparation should be mentioned in the text with a list of authors (or initials if any of the authors are co-authors of the present contribution).

  • Published conference abstracts and recognized preprint servers may be included in reference lists, but text, grant details and acknowledgements may not.

  • All authors should be included in reference lists unless there are more than five, in which case only the first author should be given, followed by ‘et al.’.

     

  Please follow the style in the printed edition of Nature in preparing reference lists:

  • Authors should be listed surname first, followed by a comma and initials of given names.

  • Titles of all cited articles are required. Titles of articles cited in reference lists should be in upright, not italic text; the first word of the title is capitalized, the title written exactly as it appears in the work cited, ending with a full stop. Book titles are italic with all main words captitalized. Journal titles are italic and abbreviated according to common usage; authors can refer to Nature, the Index Medicus or the American Institute of Physics style manual for details.

  • Volume numbers are bold. The publisher and city of publication are required for books cited. (Refer to Nature for details.)

     

• Tables should each be presented on a separate sheet of paper of the same size and orientation as the rest of the contribution.

  • Upright roman (not bold) type of the same size as the rest of the text is used, with a brief, one-line title in bold.

  • The body of the table should not contain horizontal or vertical rules; these will be added by Nature when necessary after the paper has been accepted for publication.

  • Symbols and abbreviations are defined immediately below the table, followed by essential descriptive material, all in double-spaced text.

     

• Figure legends. In contributions with Methods sections, each figure legend should begin with a brief title for the whole figure and continue with a short description of each panel and the symbols used; it should not contain any details of methods, and should not normally exceed 100 words.

  In contributions without Methods sections, each figure legend should start with a title for the figure, followed by a brief description of the panels and symbols and a description of the methods in fewer than 300 words (aiming to keep the total length of all figure legends below 800 words).

• Figures should be presented on separate pages of the same size and orientation as the rest of the contribution, assembled into the form they will occupy on the printed page.

  • Each copy should be marked with the figure number, the corresponding author’s name and, when known, the paper’s reference number.

  • Production quality electronic versions of all figures, as well as hard copies, will be requested on a disk when the editor asks for a revised version of the paper (details of acceptable electronic formats appear below).

  Unnecessary figures and parts (panels) of figures should be avoided: data presented in small tables or histograms, for instance, can generally be stated briefly in the text instead. Figures should not contain more than one panel unless the parts are logically connected; each panel of a multipart figure should be sized so that the whole figure can be reduced by the same amount and reproduced on the printed page at the smallest size at which essential details are visible.

  Amino-acid sequences should be printed in one-letter code using lines of 50 or 100 characters.

  In Articles and Letters, each page of Nature contains two columns, each 86 mm wide; a square one-column figure is equivalent to about 240 words.

  • Figures are printed in a rectangular space, so figures with several parts should be assembled into a rectangular shape in the submitted paper.

  • Most figures in Articles and Letters are printed at widths considerably smaller than one column, so panels should be small: two or three graphs can be placed side-by-side for reduction into one-column width, for example, and histograms are legible if each bar is 2 mm wide and each group of bars is separated by 1 mm.

  • Panels representing the same type of material should be reproduced at a uniform scale and with consistent size of lettering throughout, so that the width of features (for example, gel lanes) is constant in all panels.

  • It is essential to check (for instance on a photocopier) that figures and their lettering are legible when reduced to the proposed final size.

  • Lettering on figures should be in a clear, sans-serif typeface (for example Arial or Helvetica); if possible, the same typeface should be used for all figures in a paper.

  • Unnecessary color, details or decorations (such as three-dimensional ‘skyscraper’ histograms) should be avoided.

  • The type size and line spacing should be sufficient to remain clear on reduction to the minimum acceptable printed size, while avoiding unnecessarily large type.

  • Typical sizes of lettering and lines in Nature figures are 8 point and 0.25 point, respectively; authors of Articles and Letters should therefore use 10/0.31, 12/0.375, 16/0.5 and 24/0.75 point type and lines for single-column figures intended to be reduced to 80%, 67%, 50%, and 33%, respectively (that is, 112, 135, 180 and 270 mm wide before reduction).

  • We recommend that artwork is prepared at roughly the final size needed for reproduction in the journal, and prefer to reduce figures by no more than 50%.

  • Authors will see a proof of figures. Reasonable requests to enlarge figures at this stage will be considered, but Nature will make the final decision on figure size.

     

  Figures divided into parts should be labeled with a lower-case, bold a, b, and so on, in the same type size as used elsewhere in the figure.

  • Lettering in figures (labeling of axes and so on) should be in lower-case type, with the first letter capitalized and no full stop.

  • Units should have a single space between the number and the unit, and follow SI nomenclature or the nomenclature common to a particular field. Thousands should be separated by commas (1,000). Unusual units or abbreviations should be spelled out in full or defined in the legend.

  • Scale bars should be used rather than magnification factors, with the length of the bar defined in the legend rather than on the bar itself.

  • Layering type directly over shaded or textured areas (instead of creating a white box and putting the lettering within it) and using reversed type (white lettering on a black background) are best avoided, as they usually result in poor quality reproduction.

  • Where possible, text, including keys to symbols, should be provided in the legend rather than on the figure itself. (See published issues of Nature for guidance.)