How to format your references using the Marine Biology citation style

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

Murray M (2003) Anthropology. Overkill and sustainable use. Science 299:1851–1853.

A journal article with 2 authors

Spencer MK, Zare RN (2007) Comment on “Organics captured from comet 81P/Wild 2 by the Stardust spacecraft.” Science 317:1680; author reply 1680.

A journal article with 3 authors

Rai VK, Jackson TL, Thiemens MH (2005) Photochemical mass-independent sulfur isotopes in achondritic meteorites. Science 309:1062–1065.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Shcheprova Z, Baldi S, Frei SB, Gonnet G, Barral Y (2008) A mechanism for asymmetric segregation of age during yeast budding. Nature 454:728–734.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Flood BG (2013) Wealth Exposed. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Halevi S (ed) (2009) Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO 2009: 29th Annual International Cryptology Conference, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, August 16-20, 2009. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Borst P, Wielinga P (2007) Pumping Out Drugs. In: Peters GJ (ed) Deoxynucleoside Analogs In Cancer Therapy. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ, pp 109–117

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 Biology.

Blog post

Davis J (2015) Researchers Discover How Bees Naturally “Vaccinate” Their Young. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/researchers-discover-how-bees-naturally-vaccinate-their-young/. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (1984) Costs of Government Funded Trips for Invitees To Attend Space Shuttle Launches at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. 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

Agbi ES (2010) Shadow economy and the related issues of tax evasion: A comparative analysis among Canadian workers. Doctoral dissertation, Northcentral University

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

Billard M (2010) Pop Up, Jump Under. New York Times E4.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Murray 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Murray 2003; Spencer and Zare 2007).

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

Two authors: (Spencer and Zare 2007)
Three or more authors: (Shcheprova et al. 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Marine Biology
Abbreviation	Mar. Biol.
ISSN (print)	0025-3162
ISSN (online)	1432-1793
Scope	Aquatic Science Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Ecology