How to format your references using the Medical Photonics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Medical Photonics. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Owens, B., 2014. Stroke. Nature 510, S1.
A journal article with 2 authors
Lumaret, R., Ouazzani, N., 2001. Plant genetics. Ancient wild olives in Mediterranean forests. Nature 413, 700.
A journal article with 3 authors
Elioff, M.S., Valentini, J.J., Chandler, D.W., 2003. Subkelvin cooling NO molecules via “billiard-like” collisions with argon. Science 302, 1940–1943.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Clavijo-Baquet, S., Boher, F., Ziegler, L., Martel, S.I., Estay, S.A., Bozinovic, F., 2014. Differential responses to thermal variation between fitness metrics. Sci. Rep. 4, 5349.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Paczosa, S., Peruchini, C., 2013. Selling Professional and Financial Services Handbook. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.
An edited book
Levine, B., Yoshimori, T., Deretic, V. (Eds.), 2009. Autophagy in Infection and Immunity, Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
A chapter in an edited book
Szczepanowska, H.M., 2015. The Space Shuttle Discovery, Its Scientific Legacy in a Museum Context, in: O’Leary, B.L., Capelotti, P.J. (Eds.), Archaeology and Heritage of the Human Movement into Space, Space and Society. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 61–73.

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 Medical Photonics.

Blog post
Andrew, E., 2013. Aging is not universal across all organisms [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/aging-not-universal-across-all-organisms/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 2008. Health Information Technology: HHS Has Taken Important Steps to Address Privacy Principles and Challenges, Although More Work Remains (No. GAO-08-1138). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
Robert, N.A., 2017. Cortile: World Building & the Traveler Archetype (Doctoral dissertation). University of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA.

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
Blecher, G., 2016. The Diners Fade Away. New York Times MB1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Owens, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Lumaret and Ouazzani, 2001; Owens, 2014).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

  • Two authors: (Lumaret and Ouazzani, 2001)
  • Three or more authors: (Clavijo-Baquet et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleMedical Photonics
ISSN (print)2213-8846
Scope

Other styles