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

Meister, G., 2008. Molecular biology. RNA interference in the nucleus. Science 321, 496–497.

A journal article with 2 authors

Tarasov, L., Peltier, W.R., 2005. Arctic freshwater forcing of the Younger Dryas cold reversal. Nature 435, 662–665.

A journal article with 3 authors

Brisbin, I.L., Jr, Austad, S., Jacobson, S.K., 2000. Canine detectives: the nose knows-or does it? Science 290, 1093b.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Hu, Y.-L., Lu, S., Szeto, K.W., Sun, J., Wang, Y., Lasheras, J.C., Chien, S., 2014. FAK and paxillin dynamics at focal adhesions in the protrusions of migrating cells. Sci. Rep. 4, 6024.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Lagraña, F., 2016. E-mail and Behavioral Changes. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Anastasescu, C., 2016. 1D Oxide Nanostructures Obtained by Sol-Gel and Hydrothermal Methods, SpringerBriefs in Materials. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Metkar, S., Talbar, S., 2013. Conclusion and Research Direction, in: Talbar, S. (Ed.), Motion Estimation Techniques for Digital Video Coding, SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology. Springer India, New Delhi, pp. 61–64.

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

Luntz, S., 2014. Sound, Water and Camera Make A Zigzag of Awesome [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, 1991. Supercomputing in Industry (No. T-IMTEC-91-3). 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

Lu, W.-Y., 2012. The performance practice of Buddhist baiqi in contemporary Taiwan (Doctoral dissertation). University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD.

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

Shpigel, B., 2017. Rookies Impressed in N.F.L.’s Week 1. Don’t Get Too Excited. New York Times B11.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Meister, 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Meister, 2008; Tarasov and Peltier, 2005).

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

Two authors: (Tarasov and Peltier, 2005)
Three or more authors: (Hu 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

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