How to format your references using the Biomedical Optics Express citation style

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

V. Snieckus, "Richard Heck (1931-2015)," Nature 527(7578), 306 (2015).

A journal article with 2 authors

E. G. Kovaleva and J. D. Lipscomb, "Crystal structures of Fe2+ dioxygenase superoxo, alkylperoxo, and bound product intermediates," Science 316(5823), 453–457 (2007).

A journal article with 3 authors

T. H. Clutton-Brock, T. Coulson, and J. M. Milner, "Red deer stocks in the Highlands of Scotland," Nature 429(6989), 261–262 (2004).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

P. Turelli, B. Mangeat, S. Jost, S. Vianin, and D. Trono, "Inhibition of hepatitis B virus replication by APOBEC3G," Science 303(5665), 1829 (2004).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

D. Sarisky, Scriptural Interpretation (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2012).

An edited book

A. Joseph, A. Melnikov, and I. Penkov, eds., Highlights in Lie Algebraic Methods, Progress in Mathematics (Birkhäuser, 2012), 295.

A chapter in an edited book

M. Horita, H. Koizumi, R. Manabe, K. Sugisaki, and D. Nagayama, "Role of Information and Communication Technologies in Urban Regeneration," in Innovations in Collaborative Urban Regeneration, M. Horita and H. Koizumi, eds., CSUR-UT Series: Library for Sustainable Urban Regeneration (Springer Japan, 2009), pp. 43–51.

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 Biomedical Optics Express.

Blog post

E. Andrew, "A Man Can Hear Wi-Fi, And This Is What It Sounds Like," https://www.iflscience.com/technology/man-can-hear-wi-fi-and-what-it-sounds/.

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, Research and Development: Funding of Jet Aircraft Engines for Fiscal Years 1984-1988 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

B. A. McCarthy, "Mentoring’s critical components: Four traditional teachers’, four alternate -route teachers’, and four mentors’ perspectives," Doctoral dissertation, Capella University (2010).

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

J. Risen, "Trump Can Target Journalists, Thanks to Obama," New York Times (December 30, 2016).

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	Biomedical Optics Express
ISSN (online)	2156-7085
Scope