ACM Style
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) style is used in publications within the computer science field.
Page Contents:
The ACM citation style is made up of two parts:
- A reference list organized alphabetically by author last names, and assigned a bracketed number according to the order the items appear in the work. When possible, use full names of authors and not initials or abbreviations. Journal names may be abbreviated according to accepted standard.
- In-text citations, numbered in square brackets, which refer to the full citation listed at the end of the work, e.g. [1].
An item in an ACM formatted reference list looks like the example below.
The author provides an in-text citation for reference list item 4, as a number enclosed by square brackets. The number 4 indicates that this is the fourth item cited in the work and should match the corresponding item in the works cited list:
If more than one item should be referenced in an in-text citation, separate the numbers by commas, e.g. [1, 2].
Works Cited Samples in ACM Style
When creating citations, be sure to pay attention to capitalization, punctuation, italicization, and use of parentheses in the examples below.
Journal Article:
[n] Author first and last name. Year. Title of article using sentence capitalization. Journal Title in Italics & All Important Words Capitalized Volume, Issue (Issue Month and Year), page number. DOI
Journal Article Example:
[1] Patricia S. Abril and Robert Plant. 2007. The patent holder's dilemma: Buy, sell, or troll? Commun. ACM 50, 1 (Jan. 2007), 36-44. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1188913.1188915
Book:
[n] Author first and last name. Year. Book Title in Italics (edition number if available). Publisher, City, State. DOI if available.
Book Example:
[1] David Kosiur. 2001. Understanding Policy-Based Networking (2nd. ed.). Wiley, New York, NY.
Conference Proceedings:
[n] Author First and Last Name. Year of Publication. Title of work. In Title of Publication, Full date of conference, City and State of Conference.. Sponsor/Organizer of conference, City of Publisher, Page Numbers. DOI
Conference Proceedings Example:
[1] Sten Andler. 1979. Predicate path expressions. In Proceedings of the 6th. ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL '79), January 29 - 31, 1979, San Antonio, Texas. ACM Inc., New York, NY, 226-236. https://doi.org/10.1145/567752.567774
Website or Multimedia Online:
Include as much information as is available, including author, date of publication, title of page, sponsor of page, retrieve date and website. Examples:
[1] ACM. Association for Computing Machinery: Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession. Retrieved from http://www.acm.org/.
[2] Barack Obama. 2008. A more perfect union. Video. (5 March 2008). Retrieved March 21, 2008 from http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6528042696351994555