How to format your references using the Journal of Biomedical Optics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Biomedical 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	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 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

J. Goudsmit, “Obituary: Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (1923-2008),” Nature 457(7228), 394 (2009).

A journal article with 2 authors

S. Sachdev and S.-C. Zhang, “Superconductivity. Tuning order in cuprate superconductors,” Science 295(5554), 452–454 (2002).

A journal article with 3 authors

C. Y. Huang, M. A. Ayliffe, and J. N. Timmis, “Direct measurement of the transfer rate of chloroplast DNA into the nucleus,” Nature 422(6927), 72–76 (2003).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

S. Koussevitzky et al., “Signals from chloroplasts converge to regulate nuclear gene expression,” Science 316(5825), 715–719 (2007).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

C. Waine, Obesity and Weight Management in Primary Care, Blackwell Science Ltd, Oxford, UK (2008).

An edited book

B. C. Gegg, Machine Tool Vibrations and Cutting Dynamics, C. S. Suh and A. C. J. Luo, Eds., Springer, New York, NY (2011).

A chapter in an edited book

S. Kapetanakis and M. Petridis, “Evaluating a Case-Based Reasoning Architecture for the Intelligent Monitoring of Business Workflows,” in Successful Case-based Reasoning Applications-2, S. Montani and L. C. Jain, Eds., pp. 43–54, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2014).

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 Journal of Biomedical Optics.

Blog post

R. Andrews, “Underwater Robot Reveals Colorful Explosion Of Life Beneath Antarctica,” IFLScience, 21 December 2016, <https://www.iflscience.com/environment/underwater-robot-reveals-colorful-explosion-life-beneath-antarctica/> (accessed 30 October 2018).

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, “Higher Education: Information Sharing Could Help Institutions Identify and Address Challenges Some Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Students Face,” GAO-07-925, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (2007).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

S. Hankins, “A policy analysis of the Americans with Disability Act of 1990,” Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach (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

K. Kelly, “A Piece of Obama’s Life, Post-Presidency: Sandwiches and Speeches,” in New York Times, p. B1 (2017).

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

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	Journal of Biomedical Optics
Abbreviation	J. Biomed. Opt.
ISSN (print)	1083-3668
ISSN (online)	1560-2281
Scope	Biomedical Engineering Biomaterials Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics