How to format your references using the Meccanica citation style

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

van Hecke M (2007) Materials science. Shape matters. Science 317:49–50

A journal article with 2 authors

Mettetal JT, van Oudenaarden A (2007) Microbiology. Necessary noise. Science 317:463–464

A journal article with 3 authors

Rosu S, Libuda DE, Villeneuve AM (2011) Robust crossover assurance and regulated interhomolog access maintain meiotic crossover number. Science 334:1286–1289

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Bignell GR, Greenman CD, Davies H, et al (2010) Signatures of mutation and selection in the cancer genome. Nature 463:893–898

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Mullaney MD (2009) The Complete Guide to Option Strategies. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Vathy-Fogarassy Á (2013) Graph-Based Clustering and Data Visualization Algorithms. Springer, London

A chapter in an edited book

Newland MC (2012) Methylmercury and Fish Nutrients in Experimental Models. In: Ceccatelli S, Aschner M (eds) Methylmercury and Neurotoxicity. Springer US, Boston, MA, pp 55–90

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 Meccanica.

Blog post

Andrews R (2011) Submerged Greek “Lost City” Was Actually Sculpted By Microbial Life. In: IFLScience. 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 (2014) Commercial Aviation: Raising Passenger Facility Charges Would Increase Airport Funding, but Other Effects Less Certain. 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

Comorau N (2009) Postcolonial refashionings: Reading forms, reading novels. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park

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

Johnson G (2015) Cancer, Scourge of Affluent Nations. New York Times D3

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	Meccanica
Abbreviation	Meccanica
ISSN (print)	0025-6455
ISSN (online)	1572-9648
Scope	Mechanical Engineering Mechanics of Materials Condensed Matter Physics