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

Vermeij G (2015) EVOLUTION. How Victoria’s fishes were knocked from their perch. Science 350:1038.

A journal article with 2 authors

Ahmed S, Hodgkin J (2000) MRT-2 checkpoint protein is required for germline immortality and telomere replication in C. elegans. Nature 403:159–164.

A journal article with 3 authors

Lai CSW, Franke TF, Gan W-B (2012) Opposite effects of fear conditioning and extinction on dendritic spine remodelling. Nature 483:87–91.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Fumagalli L, Esfandiar A, Fabregas R, Hu S, Ares P, Janardanan A, Yang Q, Radha B, Taniguchi T, Watanabe K, Gomila G, Novoselov KS, Geim AK (2018) Anomalously low dielectric constant of confined water. Science 360:1339–1342.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

De Spiegeleer J, Schoutens W, Van Hulle C (2014) The Handbook of Hybrid Securities. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Papanikolaou A, Soudris D, Radojcic R (eds) (2011) Three Dimensional System Integration: IC Stacking Process and Design. Springer US, Boston, MA.

A chapter in an edited book

Billington J, Yuan C (2009) On Modelling and Analysing the Dynamic MANET On-Demand (DYMO) Routing Protocol. In: Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency III. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Jensen K, Billington J, Koutny M (eds) Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, p 98–126

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

Taub B (2016) The Brains Of Amputees Remember Their Lost Limbs For Decades. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/brains-amputees-remember-their-lost-limbs-decades/ (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 (2014) Data Transparency: Oversight Needed to Address Underreporting and Inconsistencies on Federal Award Website. 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

Witt SR (2017) A Study of the Relationship of Online Course Factors and Passing or Failing an Online Course. Doctoral dissertation, Capella University, Minneapolis, MN

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

Miller SK (2013) Being ‘Partly Jewish’. New York Times:A31.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Vermeij 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Ahmed & Hodgkin 2000, Vermeij 2015).

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

Two authors: (Ahmed & Hodgkin 2000)
Three authors: (Lai et al. 2012)
99 or more authors: (Fumagalli et al. 2018)

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