How to format your references using the Ocean Science citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Ocean Science. 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.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
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
Gosden, C.: Archaeology. When humans arrived in the New Guinea Highlands, Science, 330, 41–42, 2010.
A journal article with 2 authors
van Doorn, G. S. and Kirkpatrick, M.: Turnover of sex chromosomes induced by sexual conflict, Nature, 449, 909–912, 2007.
A journal article with 3 authors
Hanash, S. M., Pitteri, S. J., and Faca, V. M.: Mining the plasma proteome for cancer biomarkers, Nature, 452, 571–579, 2008.
A journal article with 100 or more authors
Matsuzawa, A., Tseng, P.-H., Vallabhapurapu, S., Luo, J.-L., Zhang, W., Wang, H., Vignali, D. A. A., Gallagher, E., and Karin, M.: Essential cytoplasmic translocation of a cytokine receptor-assembled signaling complex, Science, 321, 663–668, 2008.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Juhnke, G. A., Granello, D. H., and Granello, P. F.: Suicide, Self-Injury, and Violence in the Schools, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2010.
An edited book
Leung, C. S., Lee, M., and Chan, J. H. (Eds.): Neural Information Processing: 16th International Conference, ICONIP 2009, Bangkok, Thailand, December 1-5, 2009, Proceedings, Part II, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, XXXI, 888 p pp., 2009.
A chapter in an edited book
Boehm, M., Habich, D., Preissler, S., Lehner, W., and Wloka, U.: Vectorizing Instance-Based Integration Processes, in: Enterprise Information Systems: 11th International Conference, ICEIS 2009, Milan, Italy, May 6-10, 2009. Proceedings, edited by: Filipe, J. and Cordeiro, J., Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 40–52, 2009.

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 Ocean Science.

Blog post
Samples From Apollo 14 Suggest The Moon Is Almost As Old As The Solar System:

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: Mass Transit: Status of New Starts Program and Potential for Bus Rapid Transit Projects, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2002.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation
Chirwa, K. U.: Encumbered Existence: A Three Movement Work for Jazz Orchestra, Doctoral dissertation, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA, 2017.

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
Feldstein, M. S., Halstead, T., and Gregory Mankiw, N.: A Conservative Case for Climate Action, New York Times, 8th February, A25, 2017.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gosden, 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Gosden, 2010; van Doorn and Kirkpatrick, 2007).

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

  • Two authors: (van Doorn and Kirkpatrick, 2007)
  • Three or more authors: (Matsuzawa et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal titleOcean Science
AbbreviationOcean Sci.
ISSN (print)1812-0784
ISSN (online)1812-0792
ScopeOceanography
Palaeontology

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