Oscillation of second-order nonlinear ODE with damping (Q5900093)

The paper is concerned with the oscillation of the general nonlinear differential equation \[ ( r( t) k_{1}( x( t) ,x^{\prime}( t) ) ) ^{\prime}+p( t) k_{2}( x( t) ,x^{\prime}( t) ) x^{\prime}( t) +q( t) f( x( t) ) =0, \] where the functions satisfy certain rather specific assumptions. The structure of the paper, appearance of theorems and corollaries, as well as the proofs are quite similar to those in the recent work of \textit{X. Zhao} and \textit{F. Meng} [Appl. Math. Comput. 182, No.~2, 1861--1871 (2006; Zbl 1122.34027)]. The novelty lies in the fact that the authors use a class of weight functions \(\Phi(t,s,l)\) introduced in the recent paper by \textit{Y. G. Sun} [J. Math. Anal. Appl. 291, No. 1, 341--351 (2004; Zbl 1039.34027)]. Regretfully, the authors extracted the definition of this class and its properties from the latter work without citing the original contribution, and one may have an illusion that they have introduced this class themselves since it is referred as a ``class of new functions'' in the paper under review. Although it is asserted that oscillation criteria are ``still new even in some particular cases'', no comparison of the efficiency of the results derived in the paper (eight theorems and six corollaries) to those available in the literature is made.