How to format your references using the Mechanisms of Ageing and Development citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Mechanisms of Ageing and Development. 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

DeWeerdt, S., 2013. Bacteriology: a caring culture. Nature 504, S4-5.

A journal article with 2 authors

Discher, D.E., Eisenberg, A., 2002. Polymer vesicles. Science 297, 967–973.

A journal article with 3 authors

Helmus, M.R., Mahler, D.L., Losos, J.B., 2014. Island biogeography of the Anthropocene. Nature 513, 543–546.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Eisenberg, D., Marcotte, E.M., Xenarios, I., Yeates, T.O., 2000. Protein function in the post-genomic era. Nature 405, 823–826.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Wahbi, M., 2013. Algorithms and Ordering Heuristics for Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ USA.

An edited book

Behrends, E., Crato, N., Rodrigues, J.F. (Eds.), 2012. Raising Public Awareness of Mathematics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Nagaraju, S., 2016. Hippasa Spider: Biology, Envenomation, Toxin Profiles, and Biological Functions – A Review, in: Gopalakrishnakone, P., Corzo, G.A., de Lima, M.E., Diego-García, E. (Eds.), Spider Venoms, Ciba Foundation Symposium. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp. 313–331.

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 Mechanisms of Ageing and Development.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2016. Counting Cheetahs: A New Approach Yields Results In The Maasai Mara [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/counting-cheetahs-new-approach-yields-results-maasai-mara/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1974. Survey of Selected Computer-Based Information Systems at the Food and Drug Administration (No. 088949). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Castiglione, A., 2010. Counterproductive work behaviors: The role of employee support policies, envy, and narcissism (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Kenigsberg, B., 2017. Is Flushing the Next Great Crime Setting? New York Times AR11.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (DeWeerdt, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (DeWeerdt, 2013; Discher and Eisenberg, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Discher and Eisenberg, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Eisenberg et al., 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Mechanisms of Ageing and Development
Abbreviation	Mech. Ageing Dev.
ISSN (print)	0047-6374
Scope	Ageing Developmental Biology