How to format your references using the Coral Reefs citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Coral Reefs. 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

Paulson T (2013) Epidemiology: A mortal foe. Nature 502:S2-3

A journal article with 2 authors

Hillaire-Marcel C, de Vernal A (2008) Comment on “Mixed-layer deepening during Heinrich events: a multi-planktonic foraminiferal delta18O approach.” Science 320:1161; author reply 1161

A journal article with 3 authors

Yi-Xiang Y, Ye J, Liu W-M (2013) Goldstone and Higgs modes of photons inside a cavity. Sci Rep 3:3476

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Fyhn M, Hafting T, Treves A, Moser M-B, Moser EI (2007) Hippocampal remapping and grid realignment in entorhinal cortex. Nature 446:190–194

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Good PI, Hardin JW (2012) Common Errors in Statistics (And How to Avoid Them). John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

(2006) Towards a New Evolutionary Computation: Advances in the Estimation of Distribution Algorithms. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Shmerkin P (2015) Projections of Self-Similar and Related Fractals: A Survey of Recent Developments. In: Bandt C., Falconer K., Zähle M. (eds) Fractal Geometry and Stochastics V. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 53–74

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 Coral Reefs.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) Resveratrol Might Not Be All It’s Cracked Up To Be. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/resveratrol-might-not-be-all-its-cracked-be/

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 (1977) Proposed Amendments to the 1978 Labor, Health, Education, and Welfare Appropriations Bill.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Oppenheimer C (2010) Use of bibliotherapy as an adjunctive therapy with bereaved children: A grant proposal. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

Rothenberg B (2017) Nadal and Federer Steady a Collision Course. New York Times SP1

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Paulson 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Hillaire-Marcel and de Vernal 2008; Paulson 2013).

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

Two authors: (Hillaire-Marcel and de Vernal 2008)
Three or more authors: (Fyhn et al. 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	Coral Reefs
Abbreviation	Coral Reefs
ISSN (print)	0722-4028
ISSN (online)	1432-0975
Scope	Aquatic Science