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

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

[1]

Arendt A A 2011 Geophysics. Assessing the status of Alaska’s glaciers Science 332 1044–5

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Belle M D C and Piggins H D 2012 Physiology. Circadian time redoxed Science 337 805–6

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Callender C, Quinn I and Tymoczko D 2008 Generalized voice-leading spaces Science 320 346–8

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Hierro A, Rojas A L, Rojas R, Murthy N, Effantin G, Kajava A V, Steven A C, Bonifacino J S and Hurley J H 2007 Functional architecture of the retromer cargo-recognition complex Nature 449 1063–7

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Dinet J 2014 Information Retrieval in Digital Environments (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

[1]

Wang L 2016 Hyperspectral Image Processing ed C Zhao (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Levin B W and Nosov M A 2016 Role of the Compressibility of Water and of Nonlinear Effects in the Formation of Tsunami Waves Physics of Tsunamis Institute of Applied Physics ed M Nosov (Cham: Springer International Publishing) pp 181–262

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 Optics.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew E 2014 This Is What Viper Venom Does To Blood IFLScience

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office 1993 Space Station: Information on National Security Applications and Cost (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Farhad K 2015 Development of a web-based educational resource on the most effective micronutrients in the prevention and treatment of type 2 diabetes Doctoral dissertation (Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach)

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

[1]

Greenhouse L 2009 Justice Unbound New York Times WK1

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	Journal of Optics
Abbreviation	J. Opt.
ISSN (print)	2040-8978
ISSN (online)	2040-8986
Scope	Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics