How to format your references using the Developmental Neuroscience citation style

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

Gursky H. X-ray astronomy-40 years on. Science. 2002 Aug;297(5586):1485–6.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kolar CS, Lodge DM. Ecological predictions and risk assessment for alien fishes in North America. Science. 2002 Nov;298(5596):1233–6.

A journal article with 3 authors

Cai L, Friedman N, Xie XS. Stochastic protein expression in individual cells at the single molecule level. Nature. 2006 Mar;440(7082):358–62.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Millard SS, Flanagan JJ, Pappu KS, Wu W, Zipursky SL. Dscam2 mediates axonal tiling in the Drosophila visual system. Nature. 2007 Jun;447(7145):720–4.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ramirez J. Accounting for Derivatives. Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd; 2007.

An edited book

Han FX. Biogeochemistry of Trace Elements in Arid Environments. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands; 2007.

A chapter in an edited book

Shiraishi M, Ito A. Disturbance Observer Design Based on Frequency Domain. In: Higuchi T, Suzumori K, Tadokoro S, editors. Next-Generation Actuators Leading Breakthroughs. London: Springer; 2010; pp 31–43.

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 Neuroscience.

Blog post

Fang J. Dolphins and Belugas Squeal With Delight [Internet]. IFLScience. 2014 Aug [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/dolphins-and-belugas-squeal-delight/

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. Air Traffic Control: Analysis of Proposal to Create a Government Corporation. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1995.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Slaughter RA. Tradition and Progress: California Fire Technology Directors Beliefs and Values. 2017

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

Murphy MJO. ‘Bond, James Bond,’ Through the Years. New York Times. 2015 Nov;C37.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Developmental Neuroscience
Abbreviation	Dev. Neurosci.
ISSN (print)	0378-5866
ISSN (online)	1421-9859
Scope	Developmental Neuroscience Neurology