This paper considers the time-varying formation problem of tracking a reference for a class of networked systems consisting of multiple nonlinear subsystems with unknown parameters and nonidentical nonlinear dynamics. The communication status among the subsystems is represented by a directed graph. A portion of subsystems have no access to the information of reference. Distributed adaptive controllers are proposed by employing backstepping technique. It is proved that, with the proposed scheme, all the closed-loop signals are globally bounded and all the subsystems can track the reference while building and keeping the prescribed time-varying formation shape. Simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.