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. A. Davies, “Biological techniques: Kidney tissue grown from induced stem cells,” Nature 526(7574), 512–513 (2015).

A journal article with 2 authors

J. R. Zimbelman and S. P. Scheidt, “Hesperian age for western Medusae Fossae Formation, Mars,” Science 336(6089), 1683 (2012).

A journal article with 3 authors

C. D. Kaplan, L. Laprade, and F. Winston, “Transcription elongation factors repress transcription initiation from cryptic sites,” Science 301(5636), 1096–1099 (2003).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

J. Aizenberg et al., “Direct fabrication of large micropatterned single crystals,” Science 299(5610), 1205–1208 (2003).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

T. K. Çapin et al., Avatars in Networked Virtual Environments, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK (2001).

An edited book

J. Akiyama et al., Eds., Computational Geometry, Graphs and Applications: 9th International Conference, CGGA 2010, Dalian, China, November 3-6, 2010, Revised Selected Papers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2011).

A chapter in an edited book

N. Argyris, J. R. Figueira, and A. Morton, “Interactive Multicriteria Methods in Portfolio Decision Analysis,” in Portfolio Decision Analysis: Improved Methods for Resource Allocation, A. Salo, J. Keisler, and A. Morton, Eds., pp. 107–130, Springer, New York, NY (2011).

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

T. Hale, “Dig Begins For Legendary Nazi Gold Train,” IFLScience, 17 August 2016 (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, “The F-14/PHOENIX Aircraft Program,” 093802, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (1973).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

K. B. Asare, “Understanding the Transformational Leadership Practices of Colleges of Education Principals,” Doctoral dissertation, Northcentral University (2016).

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

L. Rafkin, “Sascha Rothchild and Matt Kay,” in New York Times, p. ST14 (2011).

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

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