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

PRUSINER SB (2012). Cell biology. A unifying role for prions in neurodegenerative diseases. Science 336: 1511–1513.

A journal article with 2 authors

KIM BH, KWON JW (2014). Metal catalyst for low-temperature growth of controlled zinc oxide nanowires on arbitrary substrates. Sci Rep 4: 4379.

A journal article with 3 authors

LIU W, PELLEGRINI M, WANG X (2014). Detecting communities based on network topology. Sci Rep 4: 5739.

A journal article with 20 or more authors

HUANG Y-K, CHEN S-C, HO Y-H, LIN C-Y, LIN M-F (2014). Feature-rich magnetic quantization in sliding bilayer graphenes. Sci Rep 4: 7509.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

BUCHENAU J (2011). The Last Caudillo. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK.

An edited book

ARTALEJO JR (2008). Retrial Queueing Systems: A Computational Approach, Ed. A Gómez-Corral. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

SUZUKI A, RAYA Á, KAWAKAMI Y, MORITA M, MATSUI T, NAKASHIMA K, GAGE FH, RODRÍGUEZ-ESTEBAN C, BELMONTE JCI (2009). Maintenance of Embryonic Stem Cell Pluripotency by Nanog-Mediated Dedifferentiation of Committed Mesoderm Progenitors. In Regulatory Networks in Stem Cells (Eds VK Rajasekhar and MC Vemuri). Humana Press, Totowa, NJ, pp. 37–53.

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

ANDREW E (2014). Doctors in India Remove 232 Teeth From Mouth Of Teenage Boy. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/doctors-india-remove-232-teeth-mouth-teenage-boy/ [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 (1998). Aviation Competition: International Aviation Alliances and the Influence of Airline Marketing Practices. 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

PONDER S (2010). Parent information nights: An elementary school principal’s search to increase parent input and affect the learning-at-home environment. Doctoral dissertation, Lindenwood 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

SCHMIDT MS (2017). Mueller Inquiry Seeks Documents On Trump Firings. New York Times: A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Prusiner, 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Kim and Kwon, 2014; Prusiner, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Kim and Kwon, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Huang et al., 2014)

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