How to format your references using the OSA Continuum citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for OSA Continuum (OSAC). 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

A. Abbott, "Rising star crashes back to Earth," Nature 419, 420–421 (2002).

A journal article with 2 authors

J. F. Kasting and J. L. Siefert, "Life and the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere," Science 296, 1066–1068 (2002).

A journal article with 3 authors

D. J. Dickinson, W. J. Nelson, and W. I. Weis, "A polarized epithelium organized by beta- and alpha-catenin predates cadherin and metazoan origins," Science 331, 1336–1339 (2011).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

E. J. Howells, D. Abrego, G. O. Vaughan, and J. A. Burt, "Coral spawning in the Gulf of Oman and relationship to latitudinal variation in spawning season in the northwest Indian Ocean," Sci. Rep. 4, 7484 (2014).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

L. Kimberlin, A. zur Linden, and L. Ruoff, Atlas of Clinical Imaging and Anatomy of the Equine Head (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016).

An edited book

L. Mamatas, I. Matta, P. Papadimitriou, and Y. Koucheryavy, eds., Wired/Wireless Internet Communications: 14th IFIP WG 6.2 International Conference, WWIC 2016, Thessaloniki, Greece, May 25-27, 2016, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer International Publishing, 2016), Vol. 9674.

A chapter in an edited book

S. Fujiyama-Nakamura, K. Yamagata, and S. Kato, "Hormonal Repression of miRNA Biosynthesis Through a Nuclear Steroid Hormone Receptor," in Regulation of MicroRNAs, H. Großhans, ed., Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology (Springer US, 2010), pp. 43–55.

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 OSA Continuum.

Blog post

S. Luntz, "Amazing Photographs & Video Of Snake Devouring Crocodile," https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/amazing-photographs-video-snake-devouring-crocodile/.

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, Indian Affairs: Better Management and Accountability Needed to Improve Indian Education (U.S. Government Printing Office, 2013).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

K. Thompson, "An Introduction to the Cox Proportional Hazards Model and Its Applications to Survival Analysis," Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University (2014).

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

N. MacFARQUHAR, "Demonstrators Hit the Streets to Fight Moscow’s Mass Renovation Plan," New York Times (May 15, 2017).

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	OSA Continuum
ISSN (online)	2578-7519
Scope