How to format your references using the Marine and Petroleum Geology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Marine and Petroleum Geology. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Long, J.C.S., 2011. Piecemeal cuts won’t add up to radical reductions. Nature 478, 429.
A journal article with 2 authors
Hattori, M., Gouaux, E., 2012. Molecular mechanism of ATP binding and ion channel activation in P2X receptors. Nature 485, 207–212.
A journal article with 3 authors
Barwick, B., Flannigan, D.J., Zewail, A.H., 2009. Photon-induced near-field electron microscopy. Nature 462, 902–906.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Abbamonte, P., Blumberg, G., Rusydi, A., Gozar, A., Evans, P.G., Siegrist, T., Venema, L., Eisaki, H., Isaacs, E.D., Sawatzky, G.A., 2004. Crystallization of charge holes in the spin ladder of Sr14Cu24O41. Nature 431, 1078–1081.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Burger, M., Graeber, B., Schindlmayr, G., 2014. Managing Energy Risk. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.
An edited book
Seckbach, J., Kociolek, P. (Eds.), 2011. The Diatom World, Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.
A chapter in an edited book
Yip, N.M., 2013. Challenges to Public Housing in Post-colonial Hong Kong, in: Chen, J., Stephens, M., Man, Y. (Eds.), The Future of Public Housing: Ongoing Trends in the East and the West. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 65–83.

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 Petroleum Geology.

Blog post
Fang, J., 2014. Mysterious 55-Million-Year-Old Rhino-Horse Relative Found in India [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/mysterious-55-million-year-old-rhino-horse-relative-found-india/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1991. U.S.-Korea Fighter Coproduction Program--the F-16 Version (No. T-NSIAD-91-53). 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
Lamb, B.K., 2015. A Comparison of Carbon Dioxide Emissions at a Roundabout and a Signalized Intersection in a Mid-Sized City (Doctoral dissertation). Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL.

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
Peters, J.W., 2017. A Conspiracy Theorist, His False Comey Tweet And a Runaway Story. New York Times A22.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Long, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Hattori and Gouaux, 2012; Long, 2011).

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

  • Two authors: (Hattori and Gouaux, 2012)
  • Three or more authors: (Abbamonte et al., 2004)

About the journal

Full journal titleMarine and Petroleum Geology
AbbreviationMar. Pet. Geol.
ISSN (print)0264-8172
ScopeEconomic Geology
Geology
Geophysics
Oceanography
Stratigraphy

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