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]

Smaglik P 2003 Risky business Nature 425 987

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Bridson R and Batty C 2010 Computer science. Computational physics in film Science 330 1756–7

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Redhu S K, Castronovo M and Nicholson A W 2013 Digital imprinting of RNA recognition and processing on a self-assembled nucleic acid matrix Sci. Rep. 3 2550

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Bautista D M, Siemens J, Glazer J M, Tsuruda P R, Basbaum A I, Stucky C L, Jordt S-E and Julius D 2007 The menthol receptor TRPM8 is the principal detector of environmental cold Nature 448 204–8

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Blair R and Regenstein J M 2015 Genetic Modification and Food Quality (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

[1]

Güçlü A D 2014 Graphene Quantum Dots ed P Potasz, M Korkusinski and P Hawrylak (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Constantinescu C 2010 A Remark on W*-Tensor Products of W*-Algebras Nonlinear Analysis and Variational Problems: In Honor of George Isac Springer Optimization and Its Applications ed P M Pardalos, T M Rassias and A A Khan (New York, NY: Springer) pp 37–52

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 2015 Disappearing Hedgehogs Show Familiarity May Be A Curse 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 1973 Protest Against Award for Computer System (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]

Vargo G 2010 Social protest and the novel: Chartism, the radical press, and early Victorian fiction Doctoral dissertation (New York, NY: Columbia University)

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]

Sehgal P 2017 McPhee on McPhee: A Master’s Valedictory Lap New York Times C3

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