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

Lemke, P., 2001. Climate. Open windows to the polar oceans. Science 292, 1670–1671.

A journal article with 2 authors

Bada, J.L., Lazcano, A., 2002. Origin of life. Some like it hot, but not the first biomolecules. Science 296, 1982–1983.

A journal article with 3 authors

Otto, S.B., Rall, B.C., Brose, U., 2007. Allometric degree distributions facilitate food-web stability. Nature 450, 1226–1229.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Li, L.L., Zhang, P., Zhang, Z.J., Zhang, Z.F., 2014. Intrinsically higher fatigue cracking resistance of the penetrable and movable incoherent twin boundary. Sci. Rep. 4, 3744.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Paris, Jocelyn L., Paris, Judy L., 2008. CliffsNotes® Praxis II®. Wiley Publishing, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Iai, S. (Ed.), 2011. Geotechnics and Earthquake Geotechnics Towards Global Sustainability, Geotechnical, Geological, and Earthquake Engineering. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Frank, R.L., Shterenberg, R.G., 2007. On the Spectrum of Partially Periodic Operators, in: Janas, J., Kurasov, P., Laptev, A., Naboko, S., Stolz, G. (Eds.), Operator Theory, Analysis and Mathematical Physics, Operator Theory: Advances and Applications. Birkhäuser, Basel, pp. 35–50.

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

Andrew, E., 2014. Why Did Dinosaurs Evolve Feathers Long Before Flight? [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/why-did-dinosaurs-evolve-colorful-feathers-long-flight/ (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, 1994. Technology Transfers: Benefits of Cooperative R&D Agreements (No. RCED-95-52). 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

Ladd, R.J., 2014. A Study of Alternative Education Programs in the State of Missouri (Doctoral dissertation). Lindenwood University, St. Charles, MO.

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

Mueller, B., Wang, V., Piccoli, S., 2017. 3 Men From Shelter Held in Sexual Assault on Woman Leaving Church. New York Times A17.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lemke, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Bada and Lazcano, 2002; Lemke, 2001).

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

Two authors: (Bada and Lazcano, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Li et al., 2014)

About the journal

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