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

Stein, L., 2002. Creating a bioinformatics nation. Nature 417, 119–120.

A journal article with 2 authors

Hoorn, C., Flantua, S., 2015. Geology. An early start for the Panama land bridge. Science 348, 186–187.

A journal article with 3 authors

Burnham, D., Kitamura, C., Vollmer-Conna, U., 2002. What’s new, pussycat? On talking to babies and animals. Science 296, 1435.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Makeig, S., Westerfield, M., Jung, T.P., Enghoff, S., Townsend, J., Courchesne, E., Sejnowski, T.J., 2002. Dynamic brain sources of visual evoked responses. Science 295, 690–694.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chang, C.M., 2010. Service Systems Management and Engineering. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Arestis, P., Sawyer, M. (Eds.), 2016. Financial Liberalisation: Past, Present and Future, International Papers in Political Economy. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Augl, M., 2012. Building a Conceptual Roadmap for Systemic Change – A Novel Approach to Change Management in Expert Organizations in Health Care, in: Stary, C. (Ed.), S-BPM ONE – Scientific Research: 4th International Conference, S-BPM ONE 2012, Vienna, Austria, April 4-5, 2012. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 43–61.

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., 2013. What is a comet, and will ISON explode? [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (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, 1975. College Work-Study Program at the Bay College of Maryland (No. 089626). 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

Tsang, S.D., 2012. The depth range of azimuthal anisotropy beneath Southern California via analyses of long-period Rayleigh-waves (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Ganz, C., Leland, J., 2017. Chris Cornell, Frontman for Soundgarden and Audioslave, Dies at 52. New York Times B14.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Stein, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Hoorn and Flantua, 2015; Stein, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Hoorn and Flantua, 2015)
Three or more authors: (Makeig et al., 2002)

About the journal

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

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