How to format your references using the Gerontology citation style

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

Ahmed F. Health: Edible advice. Nature. 2010 Dec;468(7327):S10-2.

A journal article with 2 authors

Dulvy NK, Kindsvater HK. Ecology: Recovering the potential of coral reefs. Nature. 2015 Apr;520(7547):304–5.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kingon AI, Maria JP, Streiffer SK. Alternative dielectrics to silicon dioxide for memory and logic devices. Nature. 2000 Aug;406(6799):1032–8.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Chen L, Zhu Y, Yang D, Zou R, Wu J, Tian H. Synthesis and antibacterial activities of antibacterial peptides with a spiropyran fluorescence probe. Sci Rep. 2014 Oct;4:6860.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Tibergien M, Pomering R. Practice Made (More) Perfect. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2011.

An edited book

Oswalt TD, Gilmore G, editors. Planets, Stars and Stellar Systems: Volume 5: Galactic Structure and Stellar Populations. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands; 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

Rozowsky J, Bertone P, Royce T, Weissman S, Snyder M, Gerstein M. Analysis of Genomic Tiling Microarrays for Transcript Mapping and the Identification of Transcription Factor Binding Sites. In: Setubal JC, Verjovski-Almeida S, editors. Advances in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology: Brazilian Symposium on Bioinformatics, BSB 2005, Sao Leopoldo, Brazil, July 27-29, 2005. Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2005; pp 28–9.

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 Gerontology.

Blog post

Andrew D. Each Part Of The Brain Has Its Own Rhythmic ‘Fingerprint’ [Internet]. IFLScience. 2016 Jul [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/brain/each-part-of-the-brain-has-its-own-rhythmic-fingerprint/

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. ADP Systems: Status of SSA’s Modernization Efforts. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1988.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Alvarez C. Support groups for children of depressed parents: A grant proposal. 2015

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

Risen J, Rosenberg M. President Wants Ally to Review U.S. Spy Agencies. New York Times. 2017 Feb;A1.

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	Gerontology
Abbreviation	Gerontology
ISSN (print)	0304-324X
ISSN (online)	1423-0003
Scope	Ageing Geriatrics and Gerontology

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