How to format your references using the Journal of the Optical Society of America A citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of the Optical Society of America A. 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

A. Moro-Martin, "A call to those who care about Europe’s science," Nature 514, 141 (2014).

A journal article with 2 authors

B. G. Richmond and D. S. Strait, "Evidence that humans evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor," Nature 404, 382–385 (2000).

A journal article with 3 authors

T. L. Hedrick, B. Cheng, and X. Deng, "Wingbeat time and the scaling of passive rotational damping in flapping flight," Science 324, 252–255 (2009).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

E. Farhi, J. Goldstone, S. Gutmann, J. Lapan, A. Lundgren, and D. Preda, "A quantum adiabatic evolution algorithm applied to random instances of an NP-complete problem," Science 292, 472–475 (2001).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

R. Schwartz, Rethinking Pragmatism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

An edited book

A. Rogers, The Indirect Estimation of Migration: Methods for Dealing with Irregular, Inadequate, and Missing Data, The Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis (Springer Netherlands, 2010), Vol. 26.

A chapter in an edited book

M. Giaquinto, "Mathematical Activity," in Visualization, Explanation and Reasoning Styles in Mathematics, P. Mancosu, K. F. Jørgensen, and S. A. Pedersen, eds. (Springer Netherlands, 2005), pp. 75–87.

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 the Optical Society of America A.

Blog post

J. O`Callaghan, "Scientists Have Peered Inside The Dwarf Planet Ceres For The First Time," https://www.iflscience.com/space/scientists-peer-inside-ceres-for-the-first-time/.

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, FAA Budget: 1991 Funding Request for Computers and Communications Can Be Reduced (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1990).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

M. Roberts, "Use of Stay Interviews as a Retention Tool for Key Talent," Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine University (2017).

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

M. Apuzzo and M. S. Schmidt, "Comey Tells How Trump Persisted in Pleas to F.B.I," New York Times (June 7, 2017).

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 the Optical Society of America A
ISSN (print)	1084-7529
ISSN (online)	1520-8532
Scope