How to format your references using the Marine Ecology Progress Series citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Marine Ecology Progress Series. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Bowen G (2015) Hydrology: The diversified economics of soil water. Nature 525:43–44.

A journal article with 2 authors

Soundararajan V, Aravamudan M (2014) Global connectivity of hub residues in Oncoprotein structures encodes genetic factors dictating personalized drug response to targeted Cancer therapy. Sci Rep 4:7294.

A journal article with 3 authors

Mumby PJ, Hastings A, Edwards HJ (2007) Thresholds and the resilience of Caribbean coral reefs. Nature 450:98–101.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Kangas AT, Evans AR, Thesleff I, Jernvall J (2004) Nonindependence of mammalian dental characters. Nature 432:211–214.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Cayoun BA (2015) Mindfulness-integrated CBT for Well-being and Personal Growth. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Canuto C (2015) Mathematical Analysis I, Second Edition. Tabacco A (ed) Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Gonçalves R, Knorr M, Leite J (2014) Evolving Bridge Rules in Evolving Multi-Context Systems. In: Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems: 15th International Workshop, CLIMA XV, Prague, Czech Republic, August 18-19, 2014. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Bulling N, Torre L van der, Villata S, Jamroga W, Vasconcelos W (eds) Springer International Publishing, Cham, p 52–69

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 Ecology Progress Series.

Blog post

Davis J (2015) Researchers find Physical Differences in Empathetic Peoples’ Brains. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/researchers-find-physical-differences-empathetic-peoples-brains/ (accessed 30 October 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 (2010) Traffic Safety Data: State Data System Quality Varies and Limited Resources and Coordination Can Inhibit Further Progress. 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

So RJ (2010) Coolie democracy: U.S.-China political and literary exchange, 1925-1955. Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, New York, NY

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

Qiu L (2017) Fact-Checking Assertions About the President’s Travel Ban. New York Times:A19.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Bowen 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Soundararajan & Aravamudan 2014, Bowen 2015).

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

Two authors: (Soundararajan & Aravamudan 2014)
Three or more authors: (Kangas et al. 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	Marine Ecology Progress Series
Abbreviation	Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser.
ISSN (print)	0171-8630
ISSN (online)	1616-1599
Scope	Aquatic Science Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Ecology