Citing the UCSC Browser in a Publication or Web Page

Follow these citation guidelines when using applications from 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/. 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 the readers. 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 Bioinformatics group, see our Publications page.

Genome Browser software and website

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.

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.

Genome Browser screen shots: Journal-quality screen shots of the Genome Browser can be produced by using the PDF/PS utility accessed via the View menu in the top navigation bar on the tracks display page. When including a screen shot in your manuscript, reference http://genome.ucsc.edu in the caption and cite the Genome Browser paper in the manuscript. Don't forget to mention the genome assembly used to produce the image. When including a Genome Browser URL, please remove the hgsid parameter. It is an internally-used parameter that expires after about a day.

Genome Browser data

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.