How to format your references using the Developmental Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for 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

Kleppner, D., 2008. Physics. A milestone in time keeping. Science 319, 1768–1769.

A journal article with 2 authors

Allen, M.R., Lord, R., 2004. The blame game. Nature 432, 551–552.

A journal article with 3 authors

Andrew, T.L., Tsai, H.-Y., Menon, R., 2009. Confining light to deep subwavelength dimensions to enable optical nanopatterning. Science 324, 917–921.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Saha, R., Verma, P.K., Rakshit, S., Saha, S., Mayor, S., Pal, S.K., 2013. Light driven ultrafast electron transfer in oxidative redding of Green Fluorescent Proteins. Sci. Rep. 3, 1580.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hens, H., 2012. Building Physics - Heat, Air and Moisture. Ernst & Sohn Verlag für Architektur und technische Wissenschaften GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin, Germany.

An edited book

Schneier-Madanes, G. (Ed.), 2014. Globalized Water: A Question of Governance. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Popper, A.N., Hawkins, A.D., Fay, R.R., Mann, D.A., Bartol, S., Carlson, T.J., Coombs, S., Ellison, W.T., Gentry, R.L., Halvorsen, M.B., Løkkeborg, S., Rogers, P.H., Southall, B.L., Zeddies, D.G., Tavolga, W.N., 2014. Effects of Sound Exposure, in: Hawkins, A.D., Fay, R.R., Mann, D.A., Bartol, S., Carlson, T.J., Coombs, S., Ellison, W.T., Gentry, R.L., Halvorsen, M.B., Løkkeborg, S., Rogers, P.H., Southall, B.L., Zeddies, D.G., Tavolga, W.N. (Eds.), ASA S3/SC1.4 TR-2014 Sound Exposure Guidelines for Fishes and Sea Turtles: A Technical Report Prepared by ANSI-Accredited Standards Committee S3/SC1 and Registered with ANSI, SpringerBriefs in Oceanography. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 17–21.

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 Developmental Biology.

Blog post

Carpineti, C., 2017. NASA Has Developed Futuristic Chain Mail Fabric To Use In Space [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 2007. Emergency Management: Most School Districts Have Developed Emergency Management Plans, but Would Benefit from Additional Federal Guidance (No. GAO-07-609). 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

Brookman, D., 2009. Establishing context for referents in online chatroom conversations (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Vecsey, G., 2009. Balancing Football and Academic Success. New York Times B16.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kleppner, 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Allen and Lord, 2004; Kleppner, 2008).

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

Two authors: (Allen and Lord, 2004)
Three or more authors: (Saha et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Developmental Biology
Abbreviation	Dev. Biol.
ISSN (print)	0012-1606
Scope	Cell Biology Developmental Biology Molecular Biology