An improved approach for studying oscillation of second-order neutral delay differential equations.

The paper is devoted to the study of oscillation of solutions to a class of second-order half-linear neutral differential equations with delayed arguments. New oscillation criteria are established, and they essentially improve the well-known results reported in the literature, including those for non-neutral differential equations. The adopted approach refines the classical Riccati transformation technique by taking into account such part of the overall impact of the delay that has been neglected in the earlier results. The effectiveness of the obtained criteria is illustrated via examples.