How to format your references using the Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Download the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

Robinson CP. 2004. Revisiting the Baruch Plan. Nature. 432(7016):441–42

A journal article with 2 authors

Chi AS, Bernstein BE. 2009. Developmental biology. Pluripotent chromatin state. Science. 323(5911):220–21

A journal article with 3 authors

Hwang TJ, Carpenter D, Kesselheim AS. 2014. Target small firms for antibiotic innovation. Science. 344(6187):967–69

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Chen D, Steele AD, Lindquist S, Guarente L. 2005. Increase in activity during calorie restriction requires Sirt1. Science. 310(5754):1641

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Vorbrüggen H. 2005. Silicon-Mediated Transformations of Functional Groups. Weinheim, FRG: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA

An edited book

Jefferies ME, Yeap W-K, eds. 2008. Robotics and Cognitive Approaches to Spatial Mapping, Vol. 38. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer

A chapter in an edited book

Rehm G, Uszkoreit H. 2012. Om META-NET. In The Danish Language in the Digital Age, eds. G Rehm, H Uszkoreit, pp. 32–32. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology.

Blog post

Davis J. 2015. Researchers Trick Migrating Song Birds By Altering The Magnetic Field They’re Exposed To. IFLScience. www.iflscience.com

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office. 1978. Coordination, Policy Development, and Implementation for International Telecommunications Facilities. 106775, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Winton TW. 2015. Student and Teacher Perceptions of Standards-based Grading and Student Performance. Doctoral dissertation thesis. Lindenwood University

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Feeney K. 2007. Order at the Court. New York Times, Sep. 16, , p. 14NJ19

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Robinson 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Chi & Bernstein 2009; Robinson 2004).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Chi & Bernstein 2009)
Three or more authors: (Chen et al. 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology
Abbreviation	Annu. Rev. Cell Dev. Biol.
ISSN (print)	1081-0706
ISSN (online)	1530-8995
Scope	Cell Biology Developmental Biology