How to format your references using the Methods in Oceanography citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Methods in Oceanography. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Heber, U., 2002. Astronomy. White dwarf mergers and the rebirth of luminous stars. Science 296, 2344–2345.

A journal article with 2 authors

Salter, M.G., Fern, R., 2005. NMDA receptors are expressed in developing oligodendrocyte processes and mediate injury. Nature 438, 1167–1171.

A journal article with 3 authors

Naranjo, B., Gimzewski, J.K., Putterman, S., 2005. Observation of nuclear fusion driven by a pyroelectric crystal. Nature 434, 1115–1117.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Maharana, S., Wang, J., Papadopoulos, D.K., Richter, D., Pozniakovsky, A., Poser, I., Bickle, M., Rizk, S., Guillén-Boixet, J., Franzmann, T.M., Jahnel, M., Marrone, L., Chang, Y.-T., Sterneckert, J., Tomancak, P., Hyman, A.A., Alberti, S., 2018. RNA buffers the phase separation behavior of prion-like RNA binding proteins. Science 360, 918–921.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Peat, J., Elliott, E., Baur, L., Keena, V., 2002. Scientific Writing Easy when you know how. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., London, WC.

An edited book

Murgante, B., Misra, S., Rocha, A.M.A.C., Torre, C., Rocha, J.G., Falcão, M.I., Taniar, D., Apduhan, B.O., Gervasi, O. (Eds.), 2014. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2014: 14th International Conference, Guimarães, Portugal, June 30 – July 3, 2014, Proceedings, Part II, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Horvath, J., Cameron, R., 2015. Robots, Drones, and Other Things That Move, in: Cameron, R. (Ed.), The New Shop Class: Getting Started with 3D Printing, Arduino, and Wearable Tech. Apress, Berkeley, CA, pp. 47–55.

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 Methods in Oceanography.

Blog post

Hamilton, K., 2016. How A Single Word Sparked A Four-Year Saga Of Climate Fact-Checking And Blog Backlash [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (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, 2008. Space Acquisitions: Uncertainties in the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Program Pose Management and Oversight Challenges (No. GAO-08-1039). 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

Darko-Mensah, K., 2019. Application of Data Envelopment Analysis to Measure the Online Outsourcing Efficiency of Sub-Saharan African Countries (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

Kelly, K., Haberman, M., 2017. Condemnation For President By a Top Aide. New York Times A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Heber, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Heber, 2002; Salter and Fern, 2005).

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

Two authors: (Salter and Fern, 2005)
Three or more authors: (Maharana et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Methods in Oceanography
Abbreviation	Meth. Oceanogr.
ISSN (print)	2211-1220
Scope	Aquatic Science Oceanography Ocean Engineering

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