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

Wang, J. 2005. DNA polymerases: Hoogsteen base-pairing in DNA replication? Nature 437(7057):E6-7; discussion E7.

A journal article with 2 authors

Wirth, T., and L. Bernatchez. 2001. Genetic evidence against panmixia in the European eel. Nature 409(6823):1037–1040.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bunge, J., S. S. Epstein, and D. G. Peterson. 2006. Comment on “Computational improvements reveal great bacterial diversity and high metal toxicity in soil.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 313(5789):918; author reply 918.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Wood, W. T., J. F. Gettrust, N. R. Chapman, G. D. Spence, and R. D. Hyndman. 2002. Decreased stability of methane hydrates in marine sediments owing to phase-boundary roughness. Nature 420(6916):656–660.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

El-Haik, B. S. 2005. Axiomatic Quality. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Miyata, T., K.-U. Eckardt, and M. Nangaku, editors. 2011. Studies on Renal Disorders. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ.

A chapter in an edited book

Grishchuk, S., and R. Schledjewski. 2013. Mechanical Dispersion Methods for Carbon Nanotubes in Aerospace Composite Matrix Systems. Pages 99–154 in A. Paipetis and V. Kostopoulos, editors. Carbon Nanotube Enhanced Aerospace Composite Materials: A New Generation of Multifunctional Hybrid Structural Composites. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

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

Luntz, S. 2015, August 26. The Origins Of The World’s Most Powerful Ocean Current Revealed. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/physics/worlds-most-powerful-ocean-currents-origins-revealed/.

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. 1989. Customs Automation: Internal Control Weaknesses in Customs’ Revenue Collection Process. U.S. Government Printing Office, IMTEC-89-50, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Perry, E. M. 2010. Live and let live: Negotiating difference in a diverse urban neighborhood. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

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

Barron, J. 2016, October 19. Commuters Catch a Tune, and Then the Bus Home. New York Times:A20.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Wang 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Wirth and Bernatchez 2001; Wang 2005).

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

Two authors: (Wirth and Bernatchez 2001)
Three or more authors: (Wood et al. 2002)

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