How to format your references using the Marine and Coastal Fisheries citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Marine and Coastal Fisheries. 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

Sincell, M. 2000. PLANETARY SCIENCE: Newfound Worlds Hint at Hard-Knock Life. Science (New York, N.Y.) 289(5482):1125.

A journal article with 2 authors

Carrete, M., and J. L. Tella. 2013. High individual consistency in fear of humans throughout the adult lifespan of rural and urban burrowing owls. Scientific reports 3:3524.

A journal article with 3 authors

Burke, M., S. M. Hsiang, and E. Miguel. 2015. Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production. Nature 527(7577):235–239.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Rong, H., R. Jones, A. Liu, O. Cohen, D. Hak, A. Fang, and M. Paniccia. 2005. A continuous-wave Raman silicon laser. Nature 433(7027):725–728.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Stoican, F., and S. Olaru. 2013. Set-theoretic Fault-tolerant Control in Multisensor Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ USA.

An edited book

Erverdi, N. 2015. Alveolar Distraction Osteogenesis: ArchWise Appliance and Technique. Page M. Motro, editor. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Peng, B., and W. Liu. 2014. Subband-Based Blind Source Separation and Permutation Alignment. Pages 97–130 in G. R. Naik and W. Wang, editors. Blind Source Separation: Advances in Theory, Algorithms and Applications. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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 Marine and Coastal Fisheries.

Blog post

Davis, J. 2017, March 22. The Cerebellum May Be Doing More Than Previously Thought. IFLScience.

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. 1987. Data Processing: USDA Needs To Better Manage Field-Office Computer Purchases. U.S. Government Printing Office, IMTEC-87-12, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Tyler, E. P. 2013. Tectonic geomorphology of quaternary river terraces at Santa Cruz Creek, Santa Maria Basin, Santa Barbara County, California. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Chapman, M. M. 2015, October 29. U.A.W. Leaders Approve Proposed G.M. Contract. New York Times:B3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sincell 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Sincell 2000; Carrete and Tella 2013).

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

Two authors: (Carrete and Tella 2013)
Three or more authors: (Rong et al. 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Marine and Coastal Fisheries
Abbreviation	Mar. Coast. Fish.
ISSN (online)	1942-5120
Scope	Aquatic Science Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics