How to format your references using the Mechanics of Materials citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Mechanics of Materials. 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	Download the output style file
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

Knight, J., 2003. NASA seeks inspiration from microscopic views of life. Nature 421, 878.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kronenberg, M., Rudensky, A., 2005. Regulation of immunity by self-reactive T cells. Nature 435, 598–604.

A journal article with 3 authors

Rybczynski, N., Dawson, M.R., Tedford, R.H., 2009. A semi-aquatic Arctic mammalian carnivore from the Miocene epoch and origin of Pinnipedia. Nature 458, 1021–1024.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Gao, X., Tao, Y., Lamas, V., Huang, M., Yeh, W.-H., Pan, B., Hu, Y.-J., Hu, J.H., Thompson, D.B., Shu, Y., Li, Y., Wang, H., Yang, S., Xu, Q., Polley, D.B., Liberman, M.C., Kong, W.-J., Holt, J.R., Chen, Z.-Y., Liu, D.R., 2018. Treatment of autosomal dominant hearing loss by in vivo delivery of genome editing agents. Nature 553, 217–221.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Nicu, L., Leïchlé, T., 2013. Micro- and Nanoelectromechanical Biosensors. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Eiderman, V.Y., Samokhin, M.V. (Eds.), 2005. Selected Topics in Complex Analysis: The S. Ya. Khavinson Memorial Volume, Operator Theory: Advances and Applications. Birkhäuser, Basel.

A chapter in an edited book

Murad, K., Saahar@Saabar, S., Abdul Halim, A., 2015. Does Cuteness Sell? A Content Analytic Study of Children Portrayal in Press Advertisement, in: Hashim, R., Abdul Majeed, A.B. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Colloquium on Administrative Science and Technology: CoAST 2013. Springer, Singapore, pp. 29–40.

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 Mechanics of Materials.

Blog post

Taub, B., 2015. Mysterious Ancient Geoglyphs Discovered In Kazakhstan Leave Archeologists Perplexed [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/mysterious-ancient-geoglyphs-discovered-kazakhstan-leave-archaeologists-perplexed/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 2003. Space Acquisitions: Committing Prematurely to the Transformational Satellite Program Elevates Risks for Poor Cost, Schedule, and Performance Outcomes (No. GAO-04-71R). 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

Selis, A.H., 2010. Holding the center: How one Jewish day school negotiates differences in a pluralistic community (Doctoral dissertation). University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD.

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

Robles, F., Blinder, A., 2015. A Stark Image of a Shooting Carries Impact. New York Times A1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Knight, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Knight, 2003; Kronenberg and Rudensky, 2005).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Kronenberg and Rudensky, 2005)
Three or more authors: (Gao et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Mechanics of Materials
Abbreviation	Mech. Mater.
ISSN (print)	0167-6636
Scope	Mechanics of Materials General Materials Science Instrumentation