Oscillation of third-order neutral differential equations with damping and distributed delay

The present paper focuses on the oscillation of the third-order nonlinear neutral differential equations with damping and distributed delay. The oscillation of the third-order damped equations is often discussed by reducing the equations to the second-order ones. However, by applying the Riccati transformation and the integral averaging technique, we give an analytical method for the estimation of Riccati dynamic inequality to establish several oscillation criteria for the discussed equation, which show that any solution either oscillates or converges to zero. The results make significant improvement and extend the earlier works such as (Zhang et al. in Appl. Math. Lett. 25:1514–1519 2012). Finally, some examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the obtained oscillation results.