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

Poethig, R.S., 2003. Phase change and the regulation of developmental timing in plants. Science 301, 334–336.

A journal article with 2 authors

Yang, T., Shadlen, M.N., 2007. Probabilistic reasoning by neurons. Nature 447, 1075–1080.

A journal article with 3 authors

Discher, D.E., Janmey, P., Wang, Y.-L., 2005. Tissue cells feel and respond to the stiffness of their substrate. Science 310, 1139–1143.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Zhu, Z., Guan, S., Robinson, D., El Fezzazi, H., Quimby, A., Xu, S.-Y., 2014. Characterization of cleavage intermediate and star sites of RM.Tth111II. Sci. Rep. 4, 3838.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Sedivy, J., Carlson, G., 2011. Sold on Language. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Dearricott, O., 2014. Geometry of Manifolds with Non-negative Sectional Curvature: Editors: Rafael Herrera, Luis Hernández-Lamoneda, Lecture Notes in Mathematics. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Oliveira, J.N., 2009. Extended Static Checking by Calculation Using the Pointfree Transform, in: Bove, A., Barbosa, L.S., Pardo, A., Pinto, J.S. (Eds.), Language Engineering and Rigorous Software Development: International LerNet ALFA Summer School 2008, Piriapolis, Uruguay, February 24 - March 1, 2008, Revised Tutorial Lectures, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 195–251.

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

Hamilton, K., 2015. Man Sings ‘If Only I Had A Brain’ During MRI [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, 2017. Public Transit: Information on Job Access and Reverse Commute Activities after 2012 Statutory Changes (No. GAO-17-483). 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

Kolakoski, M., 2013. The appeal to be heard and the trope of listening in classic film and African American literature (Doctoral dissertation). University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.

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

Nir, S.M., Mueller, B., Navarro, M., 2015. A Tarnished Family Empire. New York Times MB1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Poethig, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Poethig, 2003; Yang and Shadlen, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Yang and Shadlen, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Zhu et al., 2014)

About the journal

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