Materials science and engineering is one of the hot research topics in the world, among which mechanical properties of materials play a critical role in application of the new materials. Based on this, a special session Mechanical Properties of Materials was held within the 2nd Global Conference on Materials Science and Engineering, Nov. 20-22, 2013. This special issue contains a selection of twenty scientific papers, which are focused on the structure, mechanical properties, and strength of materials. In this review, the selected papers from the special session are summarized. Introduction. The Global Conference on Materials Science and Engineering (CMSE) is an annual event since 2012. The CMSE 2013 was held by Hubei University of Science and Technology in the City of Xianning (Hubei, China), November 20-22, 2013. Within this event, a special session named Mechanical Properties of Materials was held. In this session, 31 papers were selected for publication, of them 20 papers are published in this special issue (1-20), two more (21, 22) in the next issue, and 9 papers are published by Materials Research Innovations (23-31). All papers underwent the standard peer-review process of the journal and were accepted for publication based on the evaluation of at least two independent anonymous reviewers. Highlighted Papers. Results of the study (1) indicate that crack tip stress distribution characteristics and crack propagation dynamics are closely related to the microstructure evolution caused by the change of a strain rate and temperature. At a lower strain rate and temperature, the crack propagated by a brittle mechanism without the change in atomic configuration near the crack tip. The stress concentration occurred at the crack tip of a growing crack. The crack propagation exhibited a gradual brittle-to-ductile transition with increasing temperature and strain rate, the peak stress was accompanied by the appearance of the microstructure evolution ahead of the crack tip. In (3), uniformly distributed TiC nanoparticle-reinforced iron-based composites were successfully prepared by planetary milling in argon and subsequent hot pressing. Nearly full density composite specimens could be obtained via milling for 6 h followed by hot pressing at 1100C under 50 MPa. Comparatively spherical TiC particles and fine fibrous Fe3C phases were observed in the iron matrix composite. Microstructural analysis results show that the average diameter of TiC particles and the length of Fe3C phases tend to decrease with an increase in the TiC volume content. Her and Wu (7) studied the annealing effect on the microstructure and mechanical properties of titanium nitride (TiN) films. Atomic force microscopy analysis demonstrated that surface roughness of TiN films decreased from 3.83 to 2.43 nm as the annealing temperatures increased from 100 to 300C. Atomic force microscopy image of