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

Houston, S.D. Anthropology. An Example of Preclassic Mayan Writing? Science 2006, 311, 1249–1250.

A journal article with 2 authors

Hug, C.; Lodish, H.F. Medicine. Visfatin: A New Adipokine. Science 2005, 307, 366–367.

A journal article with 3 authors

Moore, G.W.K.; Holdsworth, G.; Alverson, K. Climate Change in the North Pacific Region over the Past Three Centuries. Nature 2002, 420, 401–403.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Postma, H.W.; Teepen, T.; Yao, Z.; Grifoni, M.; Dekker, C. Carbon Nanotube Single-Electron Transistors at Room Temperature. Science 2001, 293, 76–79.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Brodsky, B.S.; Stanley, B. The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Primer; John Wiley & Sons, Ltd: Chichester, UK, 2013; ISBN 9781118556603.

An edited book

Balkan and Eastern European Countries in the Midst of the Global Economic Crisis; Karasavvoglou, A., Polychronidou, P., Eds.; Contributions to Economics; Physica-Verlag HD: Heidelberg, 2013; ISBN 9783790828726.

A chapter in an edited book

Srivastava, S.; Goyal, P. Existing Metal Removal Technologies: Demerits. In Novel Biomaterials: Decontamination of Toxic Metals from Wastewater; Goyal, P., Ed.; Environmental Science and Engineering; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010; pp. 31–31 ISBN 9783642113284.

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. Explainer: Why Reusable Rockets Are So Hard To Make (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 Air Force Rationale for JDAM Production Decision; 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

Robertson, E. Transitional Services for Emancipated Foster Youth: A Grant Proposal. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach: Long Beach, CA, 2014.

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

Urbina, I. A Model for ‘Clean Coal’ Goes Awry. New York Times 2016, 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	Journal of Developmental Biology
Abbreviation	J. Dev. Biol.
ISSN (online)	2221-3759
Scope