How to format your references using the Marine Pollution Bulletin citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Marine Pollution Bulletin. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Wadman, M., 2007. When the party’s over. Nature 445, 13.
A journal article with 2 authors
Pollard, D., DeConto, R.M., 2009. Modelling West Antarctic ice sheet growth and collapse through the past five million years. Nature 458, 329–332.
A journal article with 3 authors
Budd, G.E., Butterfield, N.J., Jensen, S., 2001. Crustaceans and the “Cambrian explosion.” Science 294, 2047.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Lloyd-Smith, J.O., George, D., Pepin, K.M., Pitzer, V.E., Pulliam, J.R.C., Dobson, A.P., Hudson, P.J., Grenfell, B.T., 2009. Epidemic dynamics at the human-animal interface. Science 326, 1362–1367.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Zheng, Y., Xu, X., Xu, Z., Wang, J., Cai, H., 2017. Metallic Biomaterials. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany.
An edited book
McInnis, B., 2013. HTML5 Game Programming with enchant.js. Apress, Berkeley, CA.
A chapter in an edited book
del Rio Astorga, D., Dolz, M.F., Sanchez, L.M., Blas, J.G., García, J.D., 2016. A C++ Generic Parallel Pattern Interface for Stream Processing, in: Carretero, J., Garcia-Blas, J., Ko, R.K.L., Mueller, P., Nakano, K. (Eds.), Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing: 16th International Conference, ICA3PP 2016, Granada, Spain, December 14-16, 2016, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 74–87.

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 Pollution Bulletin.

Blog post
Hale, T., 2015. Watch Two Guys Fly Their JETPACKS Alongside A Plane [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/technology/two-daredevils-fly-jet-packs-alongside-huge-plan/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1987. [Comments on Proposed Amendment to FAR Shipping Weight and Dimension Requirements] (No. B-229011). 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
Kim, J.W., 2009. Perceptually motivated automatic dance motion generation for music (Doctoral dissertation). George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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. A Romance With Long Distances. New York Times C10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Wadman, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Pollard and DeConto, 2009; Wadman, 2007).

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

  • Two authors: (Pollard and DeConto, 2009)
  • Three or more authors: (Lloyd-Smith et al., 2009)

About the journal

Full journal titleMarine Pollution Bulletin
AbbreviationMar. Pollut. Bull.
ISSN (print)0025-326X
ScopeAquatic Science
Oceanography
Pollution

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