How to format your references using the Marine and Coastal Fisheries citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Marine and Coastal Fisheries. 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 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

Bassham, D. C. 2015. Plant biology: Pigments on the move. Nature 526(7575):644–645.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kwon, H.-B., and B. L. Sabatini. 2011. Glutamate induces de novo growth of functional spines in developing cortex. Nature 474(7349):100–104.

A journal article with 3 authors

Madhu, R., V. Veeramani, and S.-M. Chen. 2014. Heteroatom-enriched and renewable banana-stem-derived porous carbon for the electrochemical determination of nitrite in various water samples. Scientific reports 4:4679.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Kaur, G., G. Pickrell, G. Kimsawatde, D. Homa, H. A. Allbee, and N. Sriranganathan. 2014. Synthesis, cytotoxicity, and hydroxyapatite formation in 27-Tris-SBF for sol-gel based CaO-P2O5-SiO2-B2O3-ZnO bioactive glasses. Scientific reports 4:4392.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hansen, S., S. Pedersen-Bjergaard, and K. Rasmussen. 2011. Introduction to Pharmaceutical Chemical Analysis. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Norton, O. R. 2008. Field Guide to Meteors and Meteorites. Page L. A. Chitwood, editor. Springer, London.

A chapter in an edited book

Cook, G. J. R. 2006. Artifacts and Normal Variants in Whole-Body PET and PET/CT Imaging. Pages 63–77 in P. E. Valk, D. Delbeke, D. L. Bailey, D. W. Townsend, and M. N. Maisey, editors. Positron Emission Tomography: Clinical Practice. Springer, London.

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 and Coastal Fisheries.

Blog post

Davis, J. 2015, August 24. Genetic Study Shows How Honey Bees Evolved In Response To Deadly Parasite. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/genetic-study-shows-how-honey-bees-evolved-response-deadly-parasite/.

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. 2017. Discretionary Grants: Education Needs to Improve Its Oversight of Grants Monitoring. U.S. Government Printing Office, GAO-17-266, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Simon, P. R. 2013. Gender grouping and its initial effect on a Title I upper elementary school during the pilot year of implementation. Doctoral dissertation, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS.

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

McKINLEY, J. C., Jr. 2017, May 11. A Murder Trial in Which the Gunman Is Unknown. New York Times:A24.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Bassham 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Kwon and Sabatini 2011; Bassham 2015).

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

Two authors: (Kwon and Sabatini 2011)
Three or more authors: (Kaur et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Marine and Coastal Fisheries
Abbreviation	Mar. Coast. Fish.
ISSN (online)	1942-5120
Scope	Aquatic Science Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics