How to format your references using the The International Journal of Developmental Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The International Journal of Developmental Biology (IJDB). 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

ZENG N (2003). Atmospheric science. Drought in the Sahel. Science 302: 999–1000.

A journal article with 2 authors

MALIK S, ROEDER RG (2013). Biochemistry. Have your PIC! Science 342: 706–707.

A journal article with 3 authors

HELLBERG ME, BALCH DP, ROY K (2001). Climate-driven range expansion and morphological evolution in a marine gastropod. Science 292: 1707–1710.

A journal article with 20 or more authors

TAMAKI S, MATSUO S, WONG HL, YOKOI S, SHIMAMOTO K (2007). Hd3a protein is a mobile flowering signal in rice. Science 316: 1033–1036.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

BECH S, ZACHAROV N (2006). Perceptual Audio Evaluation-Theory, Method and Application. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

BACKERT S (Ed.) (2016). Inflammasome Signaling and Bacterial Infections. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

NAREDO E, DUNN E, TRUJILLO L (2013). Disparity Map Estimation by Combining Cost Volume Measures Using Genetic Programming. In EVOLVE - A Bridge between Probability, Set Oriented Numerics, and Evolutionary Computation II (Eds O Schütze, CA Coello Coello, A-A Tantar, E Tantar, P Bouvry, P Del Moral, and P Legrand). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 71–86.

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 The International Journal of Developmental Biology.

Blog post

HALE T (2016). Eight Signs That You’re Smarter Than Average. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/brain/signs-youre-smarter-than-average/ [Accessed October 30, 2018].

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). Aviation Security: TSA Does Not Have Valid Evidence Supporting Most of the Revised Behavioral Indicators Used in Its Behavior Detection Activities. 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

MUNZ JA (2017). Assessing the Value of Educational Competencies of Healthcare Leaders and Organizational Factors: A Case Study Analysis. Doctoral dissertation, Northcentral University.

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

MARX L (2014). A Meeting That Couples Often Find Daunting. New York Times: ST21.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Zeng, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Malik and Roeder, 2013; Zeng, 2003).

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

Two authors: (Malik and Roeder, 2013)
Three or more authors: (Tamaki et al., 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	The International Journal of Developmental Biology
Abbreviation	Int. J. Dev. Biol.
ISSN (print)	0214-6282
ISSN (online)	1696-3547
Scope	Developmental Biology Embryology