Citing the ICTV Taxonomy

There are several ways that the ICTV taxonomy can be cited. The following may be the most useful:

  1. Direct citations of the web site “International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV): http://ictv.global/taxonomy.
  2. Citation of the ICTV Database using our manuscript in Nucleic Acids Research: 
    Black EJ, Powell CS, Dempsey DM, Hendrickson RC, Mims LR, Lefkowitz EJ. Virus taxonomy: the database of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. Nucleic Acids Res. 2025 Nov 26:gkaf1159. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkaf1159. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 41296552.
  3. ICTV Report Chapters (https://ictv.global/report) will have a corresponding Report profile published in the Journal of General Virology. These are cited at the beginning of the chapter, and can be accessed from the JGV ICTV Virus Taxonomy Profiles web page.
  4. For the most recent taxonomy release, you can cite one of the ICTV Virus Taxonomy Summaries published in JGV that summarize the latest taxonomic changes.
  5. DOIs for the most recent Master Species Lists (MSL) and Virus Metadata Resource spreadsheets (VMR) are available from Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/communities/ictv/. This also includes the latest release of all ICTV Data and application source code from GitHub.