How to format your references using the Optical and Quantum Electronics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Optical and Quantum Electronics. 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

Sparks, S.: Use the calm between the storms. Nature. 450, 354 (2007)

A journal article with 2 authors

Zhang, Y., Sontheimer, E.J.: Structural biology. Cascading into focus. Science. 345, 1452–1453 (2014)

A journal article with 3 authors

Couch, S., Sparks, R.S., Carroll, M.R.: Mineral disequilibrium in lavas explained by convective self-mixing in open magma chambers. Nature. 411, 1037–1039 (2001)

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Grimberg, A., Baur, H., Bochsler, P., Bühler, F., Burnett, D.S., Hays, C.C., Heber, V.S., Jurewicz, A.J.G., Wieler, R.: Solar wind neon from Genesis: implications for the lunar noble gas record. Science. 314, 1133–1135 (2006)

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Freeman, R.L.: Reference Manual for Telecommunications Engineering. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ (2002)

An edited book

Letschert, R., van Dijk, J. eds: The New Faces of Victimhood: Globalization, Transnational Crimes and Victim Rights. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht (2011)

A chapter in an edited book

Sheikh, M.A., Erlich, Y.: Base-Calling for Bioinformaticians. In: Rodríguez-Ezpeleta, N., Hackenberg, M., and Aransay, A.M. (eds.) Bioinformatics for High Throughput Sequencing. pp. 67–83. Springer, New York, NY (2012)

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 Optical and Quantum Electronics.

Blog post

Hale, T.: Watch This Beetle Create Its Own Scuba Diving Equipment

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: Aviation Safety: Is Re-regulation Needed To Improve Aviation Safety. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (1987)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Bernal, E.: Ethnographic research of emergent cultural themes from technology-based informal education in a museum, (2013)

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

Bernstein, N.: 22 Unclaimed Bodies Endured a Grim Detour Before Burial, (2016)

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sparks 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Sparks 2007; Zhang and Sontheimer 2014).

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

Two authors: (Zhang and Sontheimer 2014)
Three or more authors: (Grimberg et al. 2006)

About the journal

Full journal title	Optical and Quantum Electronics
Abbreviation	Opt. Quantum Electron.
ISSN (print)	0306-8919
ISSN (online)	1572-817X
Scope	Electrical and Electronic Engineering Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics