How to format your references using the Applied Optics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Applied Optics. 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

J. I. Gordon, "Honor thy gut symbionts redux," Science 336, 1251–1253 (2012).

A journal article with 2 authors

K. N. Houk and P. H.-Y. Cheong, "Computational prediction of small-molecule catalysts," Nature 455, 309–313 (2008).

A journal article with 3 authors

C. Weisz, E. Glowatzki, and P. Fuchs, "The postsynaptic function of type II cochlear afferents," Nature 461, 1126–1129 (2009).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

P. G. Piva, G. A. DiLabio, J. L. Pitters, J. Zikovsky, M. Rezeq, S. Dogel, W. A. Hofer, and R. A. Wolkow, "Field regulation of single-molecule conductivity by a charged surface atom," Nature 435, 658–661 (2005).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

G. G. Hammes, Spectroscopy for the Biological Sciences (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005).

An edited book

M. A. Kłopotek, S. T. Wierzchoń, and K. Trojanowski, eds., Intelligent Information Processing and Web Mining: Proceedings of the International IIS: IIPWM’06 Conference Held in Ustrón, Poland, June 19-22, 2006, Advances in Soft Computing (Springer, 2006), Vol. 35.

A chapter in an edited book

E. M. Dolan, J. W. Bauer, and M. J. Katras, "Making Rural Employment Work," in Rural Families and Work: Context and Problems, J. W. Bauer and E. M. Dolan, eds., International Series on Consumer Science (Springer, 2011), pp. 55–76.

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 Applied Optics.

Blog post

S. Luntz, "Signs Of 14,000-Year-Old Human Habitation Found In Southern South America," .

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, Information Technology: Architecture Needed to Guide Modernization of DOD’s Financial Operations (U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

S. Ehsani, "Design of a Teleoperation – Based Robotic Surgical System," Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University (2014).

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

G. Vecsey, "Yankees and Red Sox Make September Meaningful," New York Times (September 28, 2010).

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Applied Optics
ISSN (print)	1559-128X
ISSN (online)	2155-3165
Scope