How to format your references using the Experimental Mechanics citation style

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

Smaglik P (2003) Visions of Europe’s future. Nature 421:557

A journal article with 2 authors

Singer AL, Koretzky GA (2002) Control of T cell function by positive and negative regulators. Science 296:1639–1640

A journal article with 3 authors

Luo ZX, Crompton AW, Sun AL (2001) A new mammaliaform from the early Jurassic and evolution of mammalian characteristics. Science 292:1535–1540

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Hermann JC, Marti-Arbona R, Fedorov AA, et al (2007) Structure-based activity prediction for an enzyme of unknown function. Nature 448:775–779

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Rigby KA (2013) Aircraft Systems Integration of Air-Launched Weapons. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Demir H (2012) Luciano Floridi’s Philosophy of Technology: Critical Reflections. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Frohlich KM, Sarachan KL, Todd GC, et al (2016) Post-Transcriptional Modifications of RNA: Impact on RNA Function and Human Health. In: Jurga S, Erdmann (Deceased) VA, Barciszewski J (eds) Modified Nucleic Acids in Biology and Medicine. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 91–130

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 Experimental Mechanics.

Blog post

Davis J (2017) Entire Population Of Single Species Counted For The First Time From Space. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/entire-population-of-single-species-counted-for-the-first-time-from-space/. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (1987) ADP Budget: SSA’s Information Technology Systems Budget Requests and Obligations. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Perfitt T (2009) Megaphone: Fault tolerant, scalable, and trustworthy peer-to-peer microblogging. Doctoral dissertation, 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

Vecsey G (2012) In Hockey, Game 7 Is Different. New York Times B13

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	Experimental Mechanics
Abbreviation	Exp. Mech.
ISSN (print)	0014-4851
ISSN (online)	1741-2765
Scope	Aerospace Engineering Mechanical Engineering Mechanics of Materials