How to format your references using the Drug Discovery Today: Disease Mechanisms citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Drug Discovery Today: Disease Mechanisms. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

[1]

Murray CB. Materials science. Watching nanocrystals grow. Science 2009;324:1276–7.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Gin DL, Noble RD. Chemistry. Designing the next generation of chemical separation membranes. Science 2011;332:674–6.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Brummelkamp TR, Bernards R, Agami R. A system for stable expression of short interfering RNAs in mammalian cells. Science 2002;296:550–3.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

[1]

Pallé E, Goode PR, Montañés-Rodríguez P, Koonin SE. Changes in Earth’s reflectance over the past two decades. Science 2004;304:1299–301.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Mix PE. Introduction to Nondestructive Testing. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2004.

An edited book

[1]

Beer M, Kougioumtzoglou IA, Patelli E, Au S-K, editors. Encyclopedia of Earthquake Engineering. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Balks MR, Zabowski D. Soils of Grasslands and Rangelands. In: Zabowski D, editor. Celebrating Soil: Discovering Soils and Landscapes, Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2016, p. 95–118.

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 Drug Discovery Today: Disease Mechanisms.

Blog post

[1]

Andrews R. CRISPR Gene-Editing Reveals How Our Fingers And Toes Evolved From Fins. IFLScience 2016.

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office. Possible Increased Use of the Federal Telecommunications System (FTS) by Government Agencies. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1973.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Thomas Hurford CE. “In his arm the scar”: Medicine, race, and the social implications of the 1721 inoculation controversy on Boston. Doctoral dissertation. Ohio State University, 2010.

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

[1]

Gustines GG. Diversity Comes to Superheroes. New York Times 2015:D1.

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	Drug Discovery Today: Disease Mechanisms
Abbreviation	Drug Discov. Today Dis. Mech.
ISSN (print)	1740-6765
Scope	Molecular Medicine Drug Discovery