How to format your references using the Discovery Medicine citation style

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

Armbrust EV. The life of diatoms in the world’s oceans. Nature 459(7244):185–192, 2009.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kaminski D, Geisler C. Survival analysis of faculty retention in science and engineering by gender. Science 335(6070):864–866, 2012.

A journal article with 3 authors

Biswas AK, Atulasimha J, Bandyopadhyay S. An error-resilient non-volatile magneto-elastic universal logic gate with ultralow energy-delay product. Sci Rep 4:7553, 2014.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Zhu F, Farnung L, Kaasinen E, Sahu B, Yin Y, Wei B, Dodonova SO, Nitta KR, Morgunova E, Taipale M, Cramer P, Taipale J. The interaction landscape between transcription factors and the nucleosome. Nature 562(7725):76–81, 2018.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Otto M. Chemometrics. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany, 2016.

An edited book

Frishman D, Valencia A (eds.). Modern Genome Annotation: The BioSapiens Network. Springer, Vienna, 2008.

A chapter in an edited book

Roth W-M, Radford L. Re/Thinking the Zone of Proximal Development. In: A Cultural-Historical Perspective on Mathematics Teaching and Learning. Roth W-M , Radford L (eds.). pp.91–109. SensePublishers, Rotterdam, 2011.

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 Discovery Medicine.

Blog post

Andrew D. Why Losing A Dog Can Be Harder Than Losing A Relative Or Friend. IFLScience 2017.

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. Space Shuttle: NASA Faces Challenges in Its Attempt to Achieve Planned Flight Rates. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1991.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Lake AD. Hepatic stress response mechanisms in progressive human nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. 2013.

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

Kelly K. Edge or Liability? New York Times:B1, 2017.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Armbrust, 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Armbrust, 2009; Kaminski and Geisler, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Kaminski and Geisler, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Zhu et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Discovery Medicine
ISSN (print)	1539-6509
ISSN (online)	1944-7930
Scope