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

J. Wilsdon, “We need a measured approach to metrics,” Nature 523(7559), 129 (2015).

A journal article with 2 authors

M. S. Boguski and M. W. McIntosh, “Biomedical informatics for proteomics,” Nature 422(6928), 233–237 (2003).

A journal article with 3 authors

M. Mendoza, S. Succi, and H. J. Herrmann, “Flow through randomly curved manifolds,” Sci. Rep. 3, 3106 (2013).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

S. R. Franzdóttir et al., “Switch in FGF signalling initiates glial differentiation in the Drosophila eye,” Nature 460(7256), 758–761 (2009).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

M. Alexander and J. Walkenbach, 101 Ready-to-Use Excel® Macros, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ (2012).

An edited book

J.-Z. Wu, Vortical Flows, H.-Y. Ma and M.-D. Zhou, Eds., Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2015).

A chapter in an edited book

K. Sandkuhl, “Knowledge Reuse: Survey of Existing Techniques and Classification Approach,” in Business Intelligence: 4th European Summer School, eBISS 2014, Berlin, Germany, July 6-11, 2014, Tutorial Lectures, E. Zimányi and R.-D. Kutsche, Eds., pp. 126–148, Springer International Publishing, Cham (2015).

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

E. Andrew, “Banned in Europe, Safe in the U.S,” IFLScience, 12 June 2015 (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, “Findings on Current AFDC Work Programs and Implications for Pending Legislation,” T-HRD-87-12, 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

J. Donohue, “Resolving Past Liabilities for Future Reduction in Greenhouse Gases; Nuclear Energy and the Outstanding Federal Liability of Spent Nuclear Fuel,” Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University (2010).

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, “Race-Fixing Let Musician Reach Sochi, Ski Group Says,” in New York Times, p. D7 (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