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

Wolfe JM (2005) Neuroscience. Watching single cells pay attention. Science 308:503–504

A journal article with 2 authors

Kim-Muller JY, Accili D (2011) Cell biology. Selective insulin sensitizers. Science 331:1529–1531

A journal article with 3 authors

Pearson PN, Foster GL, Wade BS (2009) Atmospheric carbon dioxide through the Eocene-Oligocene climate transition. Nature 461:1110–1113

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Hanson JA, Chang CB, Graves SM, et al (2008) Nanoscale double emulsions stabilized by single-component block copolypeptides. Nature 455:85–88

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Brown MA, Kaplan L (2012) The Advanced Practice Registered Nurse as a Prescriber. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., West Sussex, UK

An edited book

Mino T, Hanaki K (2013) Environmental Leadership Capacity Building in Higher Education: Experience and Lessons from Asian Program for Incubation of Environmental Leaders. Springer Japan, Tokyo

A chapter in an edited book

Lukkarinen J (2016) Kinetic Theory of Phonons in Weakly Anharmonic Particle Chains. In: Lepri S (ed) Thermal Transport in Low Dimensions: From Statistical Physics to Nanoscale Heat Transfer. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 159–214

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

Carpineti C (2017) Outstanding Drone Footage Captures Blue Whales Feeding. 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 (1989) Supplemental Student Loans: Who Borrows and Who Defaults. 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

Kazadi MM (2013) Use of Data Fusion and SPC in Vibrations Detection. Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University

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

Marx L (2015) Yet Another Fine Romance. New York Times ST13

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