How to format your references using the Optical Engineering citation style

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

P. Maquet, “The role of sleep in learning and memory,” Science 294(5544), 1048–1052 (2001).

A journal article with 2 authors

M. Denton and C. Marshall, “Protein folds: laws of form revisited,” Nature 410(6827), 417 (2001).

A journal article with 3 authors

Y. Feng, S. Zhang, and X. Huang, “A robust TALENs system for highly efficient mammalian genome editing,” Sci. Rep. 4, 3632 (2014).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

A. S. Bower et al., “Interior pathways of the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation,” Nature 459(7244), 243–247 (2009).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

I. M. Shapiro, Energy Audits and Improvements for Commercial Buildings, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ (2016).

An edited book

G. Riccardi, Elementi di fluidodinamica: Un’introduzione per l’Ingegneria, D. Durante, Ed., Springer, Milano (2006).

A chapter in an edited book

H. H. Nguyen et al., “Discriminating Between Computer-Generated Facial Images and Natural Ones Using Smoothness Property and Local Entropy,” in Digital-Forensics and Watermarking: 14th International Workshop, IWDW 2015, Tokyo, Japan, October 7-10, 2015, Revised Selected Papers, Y.-Q. Shi et al., Eds., pp. 39–50, Springer International Publishing, Cham (2016).

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 Engineering.

Blog post

J. Davis, “Scientists Map The Amazon By Its Chemical Traits,” IFLScience, 26 May 2015, <https://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/scientists-map-amazon-its-chemical-traits/> (accessed 30 October 2018).

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, “Space Based Infrared System High Program and its Alternative,” GAO-07-1088R, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (2007).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

A. Weygandt, “Extension of Elementary Functions to Zeon Algebras,” Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois 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. Pilon, “For Coed Grand Slam Event, Reaction Seems to Be Mixed, Too,” in New York Times, p. B10 (2014).

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

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	Optical Engineering
Abbreviation	Opt. Eng.
ISSN (print)	0091-3286
ISSN (online)	1560-2303
Scope	General Engineering Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics