How to format your references using the Journal of Optics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Optics. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

[1]

Kürti L 2015 Organic chemistry. Streamlining amine synthesis Science 348 863–4

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Marks T J and Hersam M C 2015 Materials science: Semiconductors grown large and thin Nature 520 631–2

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Tomonaga M, Uwano Y and Saito T 2014 How dolphins see the world: a comparison with chimpanzees and humans Sci. Rep. 4 3717

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Engin F, Nguyen T, Yermalovich A and Hotamisligil G S 2014 Aberrant islet unfolded protein response in type 2 diabetes Sci. Rep. 4 4054

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Mubarak S 2010 Construction Project Scheduling and Control (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

[1]

Benzaouia A 2016 Two-Dimensional Systems: From Introduction to State of the Art vol 28, ed A Hmamed and F Tadeo (Cham: Springer International Publishing)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Bennett J E 2015 Diagnostic Histopathology Diagnosis and Treatment of Fungal Infections ed D R Hospenthal and M G Rinaldi (Cham: Springer International Publishing) pp 37–43

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 Journal of Optics.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew E 2014 Genet Rides Piggyback on Rhinos and Buffaloes IFLScience

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office 1970 Status, Progress, and Problems in Federal Agency Accounting 1969 Annual Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Le Blanc J D 2017 Helping African American Middle School Students Transition to High School with the New Normal Project: A Grant Proposal Doctoral dissertation (Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach)

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

[1]

Crow K 2001 Like the Schemes of Mice and Men, A Portrait of Burns Goes Astray New York Times 144

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	Journal of Optics
Abbreviation	J. Opt.
ISSN (print)	2040-8978
ISSN (online)	2040-8986
Scope	Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics