How to format your references using the Optics Express citation style

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

R. H. Baughman, "Retrospective. Alan G. MacDiarmid (1927-2007)," Science 315(5819), 1678 (2007).

A journal article with 2 authors

B. A. Linkenhoker and E. I. Knudsen, "Incremental training increases the plasticity of the auditory space map in adult barn owls," Nature 419(6904), 293–296 (2002).

A journal article with 3 authors

E. A. Holmes, M. G. Craske, and A. M. Graybiel, "Psychological treatments: A call for mental-health science," Nature 511(7509), 287–289 (2014).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

T. Monnin, F. L. W. Ratnieks, G. R. Jones, and R. Beard, "Pretender punishment induced by chemical signalling in a queenless ant," Nature 419(6902), 61–65 (2002).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

S. T. Kudnig and B. Séguin, Veterinary Surgical Oncology (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd,., 2012).

An edited book

S. Bandyopadhyay, Unsupervised Classification: Similarity Measures, Classical and Metaheuristic Approaches, and Applications (Springer, 2013).

A chapter in an edited book

L. Rónyai and T. Mészáros, "Some Combinatorial Applications of Gröbner Bases," in Algebraic Informatics: 4th International Conference, CAI 2011, Linz, Austria, June 21-24, 2011. Proceedings, F. Winkler, ed., Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer, 2011), pp. 65–83.

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 Optics Express.

Blog post

E. Andrew, "Nanoparticles In Baby Formula: Should Parents Be Worried?," https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/nanoparticles-baby-formula-should-parents-be-worried/.

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, Propriety of Additional Reimbursement for Shipment of Household Effects (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

C. S. Kim, "Electronic Transport of Thin Crystals in Ruthenium Chloride," Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach (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

K. Barker, M. Schwirtz, and L. W. Foderaro, "2 Lives Collide in Fatal Night Inside Shelter," New York Times (January 30, 2016).

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	Optics Express
ISSN (online)	1094-4087
Scope