How to format your references using the Coral Reefs citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Coral Reefs. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Koenig R (2000) EASTERN EUROPE: Science Survives in Breakaway States. Science 290:692–693

A journal article with 2 authors

Vollmer SV, Palumbi SR (2002) Hybridization and the evolution of reef coral diversity. Science 296:2023–2025

A journal article with 3 authors

Sagy A, Reches Z, Fineberg J (2002) Dynamic fracture by large extraterrestrial impacts as the origin of shatter cones. Nature 418:310–313

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Fukuda K, Takeda Y, Mizukami M, Kumaki D, Tokito S (2014) Fully solution-processed flexible organic thin film transistor arrays with high mobility and exceptional uniformity. Sci Rep 4:3947

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Sallaberry C (2013) Geographical Information Retrieval in Textual Corpora. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ USA

An edited book

(2008) Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. Springer, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Best E, Wimmel H (2013) Structure Theory of Petri Nets. In: Jensen K., Aalst W.M.P. van der, Balbo G., Koutny M., Wolf K. (eds) Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency VII. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 162–224

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 Coral Reefs.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) Scientists Create Simple Artificial ‘Cell’ Capable Of Spontaneous Movement. https://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/scientists-create-simple-artificial-cell-capable-spontaneous-movement/

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) Business Modernization: NASA Must Consider Agencywide Needs to Reap the Full Benefits of Its Enterprise Management System Modernization Effort.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Large KG (2008) A study of Statewide Transfer and Articulation Reporting System (STARS) approved courses completed at an Alabama community college. Doctoral dissertation, Mississippi State University

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

Walsh MW (2015) Appointee on Pensions. New York Times B5

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Koenig 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Koenig 2000; Vollmer and Palumbi 2002).

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

Two authors: (Vollmer and Palumbi 2002)
Three or more authors: (Fukuda et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Coral Reefs
Abbreviation	Coral Reefs
ISSN (print)	0722-4028
ISSN (online)	1432-0975
Scope	Aquatic Science