Follow these citation guidelines when using the Genome Browser tool suite or data from the UCSC Genome Browser database in a research work that will be published in a journal or on the Internet. In addition to the relevant paper, please include a reference to the Genome Browser website in your manuscript: http://genome.ucsc.edu. Permission is granted for reuse of all graphics produced by the UCSC Genome Browser website.
Be sure to mention the release date of the genome assembly used in your work to facilitate the examination of your data by reviewers and readers. If you would like to add a URL to the Genome Browser displaying a specific location or configuration, please use a Session URL. This will ensure all data and settings remain fixed. Please do not include references to our development servers (such as genome-test.soe.ucsc.edu) in published links or URLs.
For an extended list of publications produced by the UCSC Genome Browser group, see our Publications page. It is worth noting that as of April 1, 2020, Genome Browser papers have been cited 37,500 times in the literature. We thank authors for the acknowledgement of our efforts.
UCSC Genome Browser: Kent WJ, Sugnet CW, Furey TS, Roskin KM, Pringle TH, Zahler AM, Haussler D. The human genome browser at UCSC. Genome Res. 2002 Jun;12(6):996-1006.
Genome Browser screenshots: Journal-quality screenshots of the Genome Browser can be produced by using the View ->PDF/PS utility in the top navigation bar from the tracks page. When including a screenshot in your manuscript, reference http://genome.ucsc.edu in the caption and cite the Genome Browser paper in the manuscript. We recommend including a Session URL of your screenshot to allow readers to interact with your data and get more information.
BLAT: Kent WJ. BLAT - the BLAST-like alignment tool. Genome Res. 2002 Apr;12(4):656-64.
UCSC Table Browser: Karolchik D, Hinrichs AS, Furey TS, Roskin KM, Sugnet CW, Haussler D, Kent WJ. The UCSC Table Browser data retrieval tool. Nucleic Acids Res. 2004 Jan 1;32(Database issue):D493-6.
BigWig and BigBed tools: Kent WJ, Zweig AS, Barber G, Hinrichs AS, Karolchik D. BigWig and BigBed: enabling browsing of large distributed data sets. Bioinformatics. 2010 Sep 1;26(17):2204-7.
Track Data Hubs: Raney BJ, Dreszer TR, Barber GP, Clawson H, Fujita PA, Wang T, Nguyen N, Paten B, Zweig AS, Karolchik D, Kent WJ. Track Data Hubs enable visualization of user-defined genome-wide annotations on the UCSC Genome Browser. Bioinformatics. 2014 Apr 1;30(7):1003-5. Epub 2013 Nov 13.
UCSC Gene Sorter: Kent WJ, Hsu F, Karolchik D, Kuhn RM, Clawson H, Trumbower H, Haussler D. Exploring relationships and mining data with the UCSC Gene Sorter. Genome Res. 2005 May;15(5):737-41.
UCSC SARS-CoV-2 Genome Browser Fernandes JD, Hinrichs AS, Clawson H, et al. The UCSC SARS-CoV-2 Genome Browser. Nat Genet. 2020 Sept 9; 52:991-998.
Annotation data: Cite the most recent UCSC Genome Browser update in the Nucleic Acids Research "Database" issue. A list of these papers can be found using this tailored PubMed search. Be sure to sort the page by "Most Recent". (Cite this paper for annotation data extracted from the Genome Browser database. Annotation tracks should also be credited according to their source, which can be found on the track's description page or on the Genome Browser Credits page.)
ENCODE annotation data: Rosenbloom KR, Sloan CA, Malladi VS, Dreszer TR, Learned K, Kirkup VM, Wong MC, Maddren M, Fang R, Heitner SG, Lee BT, Barber GP, Harte RA, Diekhans M, Long JC, Wilder SP, Zweig AS, Karolchik D, Kuhn RM, Haussler D, Kent WJ. ENCODE data in the UCSC Genome Browser: year 5 update. Nucleic Acids Res. 2013 Jan;41(Database issue):D56-63.
Human genome assembly: The Genome Sequencing Consortium. Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome. Nature. 2001 Feb 15;409(6822):860-921.
Very early human genome assemblies:
Kent WJ, Haussler D.
Assembly of the
working draft of the human genome with gigAssembler.
Genome Res. 2001 Sep;11(9)1541-1548.
Cite this paper when publishing results pertaining to human genome assemblies prior to the
22 Dec. 2001 assembly.
Other genome assemblies: Manuscripts that include the use of Genome Browser assembly data from organisms other than human should cite the relevant initial sequencing paper. Often this information can be found on the Genome Browser Credits page or on the GenBank BioProject page for the organism.