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 W (2008). China’s challenge. Nature 452: 1028–1029.

A journal article with 2 authors

GERDE E, MARDER M (2001). Friction and fracture. Nature 413: 285–288.

A journal article with 3 authors

ERICKSON B, SINGH R, WINTERS P (2011). Synthetic biology: regulating industry uses of new biotechnologies. Science 333: 1254–1256.

A journal article with 20 or more authors

VIGNUZZI M, STONE JK, ARNOLD JJ, CAMERON CE, ANDINO R (2006). Quasispecies diversity determines pathogenesis through cooperative interactions in a viral population. Nature 439: 344–348.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

GUSTAFSSON F (2001). Adaptive Filtering and Change Detection. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

MANSUY R (2006). Random Times and Enlargements of Filtrations in a Brownian Setting, Ed. M Yor. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

CRESPO JM, BETARTE G, LUNA C (2009). A Framework for the Analysis of Access Control Models for Interactive Mobile Devices. In Types for Proofs and Programs: International Conference, TYPES 2008 Torino, Italy, March 26-29, 2008 Revised Selected Papers (Eds S Berardi, F Damiani, and U de’Liguoro). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 49–63.

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 The International Journal of Developmental Biology.

Blog post

LUNTZ S (2014). Most Distant Stars In The Milky Way Identified. IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/most-distant-stars-milky-way-identified/ [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 (1983). Improvements in Certain District of Columbia Public Schools’ Administrative Operations. 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

PEI X (2008). Acid modification of psyllium. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park.

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

WALSH MW (2016). A Hive of Growth, Dallas Flirts With Bankruptcy. 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 (Zeng, 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Gerde and Marder, 2001; Zeng, 2008).

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

Two authors: (Gerde and Marder, 2001)
Three or more authors: (Vignuzzi et al., 2006)

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

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