How to format your references using the Journal of Developmental Biology citation style

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

Feagin, R. Journal Club. A Coastal Ecologist Sees the Hidden Effects of Hurricanes. Nature 2009, 461, 319.

A journal article with 2 authors

Godula, K.; Sames, D. C-H Bond Functionalization in Complex Organic Synthesis. Science 2006, 312, 67–72.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kim, M.; Carman, C.V.; Springer, T.A. Bidirectional Transmembrane Signaling by Cytoplasmic Domain Separation in Integrins. Science 2003, 301, 1720–1725.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Jankowsky, E.; Gross, C.H.; Shuman, S.; Pyle, A.M. The DExH Protein NPH-II Is a Processive and Directional Motor for Unwinding RNA. Nature 2000, 403, 447–451.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Alberty, R.A. Enzyme Kinetics: Rapid-Equilibrium Enzyme Kinetics; Methods of Biochemical Analysis; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ, 2011; ISBN 9780470940020.

An edited book

Theory and Practice of Natural Computing: Second International Conference, TPNC 2013, Cáceres, Spain, December 3-5, 2013, Proceedings; Dediu, A.-H., Martín-Vide, C., Truthe, B., Vega-Rodríguez, M.A., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013; Vol. 8273; ISBN 9783642450075.

A chapter in an edited book

Moussa, R. Big-SeqDB-Gen: A Formal and Scalable Approach for Parallel Generation of Big Synthetic Sequence Databases. In Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking: Traditional to Big Data to Internet of Things: 7th TPC Technology Conference, TPCTC 2015, Kohala Coast, HI, USA, August 31 – September 4, 2015. Revised Selected Papers; Nambiar, R., Poess, M., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer International Publishing: Cham, 2016; pp. 61–76 ISBN 9783319314082.

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 Journal of Developmental Biology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. The Massive Waste Happening In Mosquito-Borne Disease Research (accessed on 30 October 2018).

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 Transportation Issue Area: Active Assignments; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1997;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Lim, L. Dual-Class vs. Single-Class Firms: Information Environment. Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University: Washington, DC, 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

Bohlen, C. Ancient Georgian Culture, Set to Music. New York Times 2017, TR1.

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	Journal of Developmental Biology
Abbreviation	J. Dev. Biol.
ISSN (online)	2221-3759
Scope