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

Guillén, N., 2014. Infection biology: Nibbled to death. Nature 508, 462–463.

A journal article with 2 authors

Atkins, J.F., Gesteland, R.F., 2001. mRNA readout at 40. Nature 414, 693.

A journal article with 3 authors

Johnson, K.S., Riser, S.C., Karl, D.M., 2010. Nitrate supply from deep to near-surface waters of the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Nature 465, 1062–1065.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Philippot, P., Van Zuilen, M., Lepot, K., Thomazo, C., Farquhar, J., Van Kranendonk, M.J., 2007. Early Archaean microorganisms preferred elemental sulfur, not sulfate. Science 317, 1534–1537.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Sandou, G., 2013. Metaheuristic Optimization for the Design of Automatic Control Laws. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ USA.

An edited book

Gervasi, O., Taniar, D., Murgante, B., Laganà, A., Mun, Y., Gavrilova, M.L. (Eds.), 2009. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2009: International Conference, Seoul, Korea, June 29-July 2, 2009, Proceedings, Part I, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Cook, A., 2013. Feeling Better: Moral Sense and Sensibility in Enlightenment Thought, in: Lloyd, H.M. (Ed.), The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 85–103.

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

Carpineti, A., 2017. Mars Might Have Had A Dense Carbon Dioxide Atmosphere [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (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, 2014. K-12 Education: Characteristics of the Investing in Innovation Fund (No. GAO-14-211R). 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

Hakes, C.J., 2010. Off -campus work and its relationship to students’ experiences with faculty using the College Student Experiences Questionnaire (Doctoral dissertation). University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.

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

Sánchez, Y., 2014. Goliath Opens His Wallet. New York Times A35.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Guillén, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Atkins and Gesteland, 2001; Guillén, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Atkins and Gesteland, 2001)
Three or more authors: (Philippot et al., 2007)

About the journal

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

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