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]

Dermitzakis E T 2011 Genome-sequencing anniversary. Genome literacy Science 331 689–90

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Zucker A A and Light D 2009 Laptop programs for students Science 323 82–5

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Long S B, Campbell E B and Mackinnon R 2005 Crystal structure of a mammalian voltage-dependent Shaker family K+ channel Science 309 897–903

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Ayoub N, Jeyasekharan A D, Bernal J A and Venkitaraman A R 2008 HP1-beta mobilization promotes chromatin changes that initiate the DNA damage response Nature 453 682–6

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Gable J and Herrmann T 2016 Counselling Skills for Dietitians (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

[1]

Pokorski M 2016 Respirology vol 885 (Cham: Springer International Publishing)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Fokkink R, Geupel L and Kikuta K 2013 Open Problems on Search Games Search Theory: A Game Theoretic Perspective ed S Alpern, R Fokkink, L Gąsieniec, R Lindelauf and V S Subrahmanian (New York, NY: Springer) pp 75–81

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]

Carpineti A 2015 China To Build World’s Most Powerful Super-Collider In 2020 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 1992 National Aero-Space Plane: Key Issues Facing the Program (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]

Gemmer J 2012 Shape Selection in the non-Euclidean Model of Elasticity Doctoral dissertation (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona)

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]

Wagner J 2016 Already Loaded With Talent, Cubs May Get a Slugger Back From an Injury New York Times B10

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