How to format your references using the Developmental Cell citation style

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

Scarpa, R. (2001). Volcanology. Predicting volcanic eruptions. Science 293, 615–616.

A journal article with 2 authors

Koh, L.P., and Wilcove, D.S. (2007). Cashing in palm oil for conservation. Nature 448, 993–994.

A journal article with 3 authors

Sakurai, H., Daiko, T., and Hirao, T. (2003). A synthesis of sumanene, a fullerene fragment. Science 301, 1878.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Wang, W., Tang, M., Yang, H., Younghae Do, Lai, Y.-C., and Lee, G. (2014). Asymmetrically interacting spreading dynamics on complex layered networks. Sci. Rep. 4, 5097.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

McDonald, A.G., and Magande, H.L. (2012). Introduction to Thermo-Fluids Systems Design (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd).

An edited book

Kirch, S.A. (2016). Being and Becoming Scientists Today: Reconstructing Assumptions about Science and Science Education to Reclaim a Learner–Scientist Perspective M. Amoroso, ed. (SensePublishers).

A chapter in an edited book

Aliev, I. (2009). Siegel’s Lemma and Sum-Distinct Sets. In Twentieth Anniversary Volume: Discrete & Computational Geometry, R. Pollack, J. Pach, and J. E. Goodman, eds. (Springer), pp. 1–8.

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 Cell.

Blog post

Andrews, R. (2016). Map Of Earth’s Mantle Reveals That It’s Churning 10 Times Faster Than We Thought. IFLScience.

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). Information Technology: VA and DOD Are Making Progress in Sharing Medical Information, but Remain Far from Having Comprehensive Electronic Medical Records (U.S. Government Printing Office).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Igualada, M.O. (2015). The beliefs of advanced placement teachers regarding equity and access to advanced placement courses: A mixed-methods study.

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

Poniewozik, J. (2017). Sex, Drugs and Archie. New York Times, C2.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

This sentence cites one reference ².
This sentence cites two references ^2,4.
This sentence cites four references ^2,4,6,8.

About the journal

Full journal title	Developmental Cell
Abbreviation	Dev. Cell
ISSN (print)	1534-5807
ISSN (online)	1878-1551
Scope	Developmental Biology

Research and Writing Guides