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 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’Callaghan T (2011) Introduction: The prevention agenda. Nature 471:S2-4.

A journal article with 2 authors

Henikoff S, Malik HS (2002) Centromeres: selfish drivers. Nature 417:227.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kuba H, Ishii TM, Ohmori H (2006) Axonal site of spike initiation enhances auditory coincidence detection. Nature 444:1069–1072.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Yoshida M, Zhang Y, Ye J, Suzuki R, Imai Y, Kimura S, Fujiwara A, Iwasa Y (2014) Controlling charge-density-wave states in nano-thick crystals of 1T-TaS2. Sci Rep 4:7302.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Posudin Y (2014) Methods of Measuring Environmental Parameters. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Saeed K, Pejaś J (eds) (2005) Information Processing and Security Systems. Springer US, Boston, MA.

A chapter in an edited book

Jiang X, Schofield AJ, Wyatt JL (2010) Correlation-Based Intrinsic Image Extraction from a Single Image. In: Computer Vision – ECCV 2010: 11th European Conference on Computer Vision, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, September 5-11, 2010, Proceedings, Part IV. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Daniilidis K, Maragos P, Paragios N (eds) Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, p 58–71

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

Andrew E (2014) Bioengineers Build Circuit Board Modeled On The Human Brain. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/bioengineers-build-circuit-board-modeled-human-brain/ (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 (2007) Information Technology: Homeland Security Information Network Needs to Be Better Coordinated with Key State and Local Initiatives. 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

Steigner T (2008) A study of cross -border takeovers: Examining the impact of national culture on internalization benefits, and the implications of early versus late -mover status for bidders and their rivals. Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL

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

Koblin J (2017) ‘True Detective’ To Return on HBO. New York Times:C3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (O’Callaghan 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Henikoff & Malik 2002, O’Callaghan 2011).

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

Two authors: (Henikoff & Malik 2002)
Three or more authors: (Yoshida et al. 2014)

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