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

O’Malley BW (2006) Molecular biology. Little molecules with big goals. Science 313:1749–1750.

A journal article with 2 authors

Chen J, Gottesman S (2014) RNA. Riboswitch regulates RNA. Science 345:876–877.

A journal article with 3 authors

Lackner LL, Horner JS, Nunnari J (2009) Mechanistic analysis of a dynamin effector. Science 325:874–877.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Snow CD, Nguyen H, Pande VS, Gruebele M (2002) Absolute comparison of simulated and experimental protein-folding dynamics. Nature 420:102–106.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Kivy P (2011) Once-Told Tales. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK

An edited book

Greenwood PL, Bell AW, Vercoe PE, Viljoen GJ (eds) (2010) Managing the Prenatal Environment to Enhance Livestock Productivity. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Robinson B (2016) The Welfare and Education of Left-Behind Children in Western China. In: Lee JC-K, Yu Z, Huang X, Law EH-F (eds) Educational Development in Western China: Towards Quality and Equity. SensePublishers, Rotterdam, pp 97–119

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

Fang J (2015) Ancient Genomes Reveal Mass Migrations During the Bronze Age. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/101-ancient-genomes-reveal-mass-migrations-during-bronze-age/. 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 (2003) Transportation Security: Post-September 11th Initiatives and Long-Term Challenges. 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

Paulone S (2013) Mergers and Acquisitions: Examining Managerial Strategy Connection to Post Transaction Accounting Measures. 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

Peters JW (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 (O’Malley 2006).
This sentence cites two references (O’Malley 2006; Chen and Gottesman 2014).

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

Two authors: (Chen and Gottesman 2014)
Three or more authors: (Snow et al. 2002)

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