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]

Butler D 2003 Agent Orange health investigation stuck at square one Nature 422 793

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Roberts L and Simpson S 2008 Drug resistance. Deadly defiance. Introduction to special issue Science 321 355

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

MacLehose L, McKee M and Weinberg J 2002 Responding to the challenge of communicable disease in Europe Science 295 2047–50

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Beck P, Gillet P, El Goresy A and Mostefaoui S 2005 Timescales of shock processes in chondritic and martian meteorites Nature 435 1071–4

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Liu E and Noppe-Brandon S 2011 Imagination First (San Francisco, CA, USA: Jossey-Bass)

An edited book

[1]

Ganguly S and Krishnamurti R 2015 Algorithms and Discrete Applied Mathematics: First International Conference, CALDAM 2015, Kanpur, India, February 8-10, 2015. Proceedings vol 8959 (Cham: Springer International Publishing)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Hales T C 2011 Sphere Packings, III. Extremal Cases The Kepler Conjecture: The Hales-Ferguson Proof ed J C Lagarias (New York, NY: Springer) pp 135–76

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]

Luntz S 2014 Monkeys Capable Of Mathematics 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 1991 U.S.-Korea Fighter Coproduction Program--the F-16 Version (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]

Peterson D G 2012 An application of geotechnical techniques to quantitative regional slope stability analysis San Clemente, California 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]

Lohr S 2017 G.E., Pressured By Its Investors, Changes Leader New York Times A1

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

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