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

Soker N (2007) Astronomy. Nebulae around evolved stars. Science 315:1086–1087.

A journal article with 2 authors

Weaver P, Johnson D (2012) Biodiversity: Think big for marine conservation. Nature 483:399.

A journal article with 3 authors

Tobie G, Lunine JI, Sotin C (2006) Episodic outgassing as the origin of atmospheric methane on Titan. Nature 440:61–64.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Daley DO, Rapp M, Granseth E, Melén K, Drew D, von Heijne G (2005) Global topology analysis of the Escherichia coli inner membrane proteome. Science 308:1321–1323.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Remy J-G, Letamendia C (2014) LTE Services. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Nicola RD, Julien C (eds) (2013) Coordination Models and Languages: 15th International Conference, COORDINATION 2013, Held as Part of the 8th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2013, Florence, Italy, June 3-5, 2013. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Raiser K (2014) Christianity and History. In: Raiser K (ed) Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker: Major Texts on Religion. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 36–48

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

Luntz S (2015) The Speed Of Light Can Vary In A Vacuum. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/physics/speed-light-can-vary-vacuum/. 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 (2012) Surface Transportation: Financing Program Could Benefit from Increased Performance Focus and Better Communication. 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

Annan F (2012) Spatial pattern of yield distributions: implications for crop insurance. Doctoral dissertation, Mississippi State 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

Kenigsberg B (2017) Film Series. New York Times C24.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Soker 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Soker 2007; Weaver and Johnson 2012).

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

Two authors: (Weaver and Johnson 2012)
Three or more authors: (Daley et al. 2005)

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

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