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

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

Owens, B., 2013. Mining: Extreme prospects. Nature 495, S4-6.

A journal article with 2 authors

Moore, M.J., Early, G.A., 2004. Cumulative sperm whale bone damage and the bends. Science 306, 2215.

A journal article with 3 authors

Zheludev, I., Smith, R., Aste, T., 2014. When can social media lead financial markets? Sci. Rep. 4, 4213.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Thompson, J.K., Simon, J., Loh, H., Vuletic, V., 2006. A high-brightness source of narrowband, identical-photon pairs. Science 313, 74–77.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Roeder, T., 2013. Managing Project Stakeholders. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Carey, F.A., 2007. Advanced Organic Chemistry: Part B: Reactions and Synthesis, 5th ed, Advanced Organic Chemistry. Springer US, Boston, MA.

A chapter in an edited book

Lee, Yeonhee, Kang, W., Lee, Youngseok, 2011. A Hadoop-Based Packet Trace Processing Tool, in: Domingo-Pascual, J., Shavitt, Y., Uhlig, S. (Eds.), Traffic Monitoring and Analysis: Third International Workshop, TMA 2011, Vienna, Austria, April 27, 2011. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 51–63.

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 Development.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2015. World’s First Genetically Modified Human Embryo Raises Ethical Concerns [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/world-s-first-genetically-modified-human-embryo-raises-ethical-concerns/ (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, 1992. NASA Procurement: Opportunities to Improve Contract Management (No. T-NSIAD-92-33). 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

Tickner, A., 2009. Production and consumption at the hillfort site of Mont Dardon, France: An archeobotanical analysis (Doctoral dissertation). University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.

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

Brantley, B., 2017. An Embrace on a Grim Day. New York Times C1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Owens, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Moore and Early, 2004; Owens, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Moore and Early, 2004)
Three or more authors: (Thompson et al., 2006)

About the journal

Full journal title	Mechanisms of Development
Abbreviation	Mech. Dev.
ISSN (print)	0925-4773
Scope	Developmental Biology Embryology