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Interactive Media (IMED) & Human-Centered Interaction Design (HCID)

Library resources and research information for courses in the IMED and HCID programs.

ACM Style and Citation Format

The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is the world’s largest computing society, with many SIGs (Special Interest Groups) sponsoring annual conferences, workshops, publications, and symposia.  ACM Style is the standard for the format of scholarly publications in the computing field.

ACM citation style includes in-text citations, numbered in square brackets, which refer to the full citation listed in the reference list at the end of the paper. The reference list is organized alphabetically by author last names, and assigned a number according to its placement on the list. For examples, see the ACM Citation Style guide.

In this example, the author provides an in-text citation for reference list item 4, as a number enclosed by square brackets:

Mineral processing allows for the separation of commercially available minerals from their ore [4].

 

The Reference list at the end of the document provides provides full details of the source.  References are numbered in alphabetical order by author's last name:

[4] Ashok Gupta and Denis Yan. 2016. Mineral Processing Design and Operations: An Introduction (2nd. ed.). Elsevier, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

The basic format for a book is: [#]      Author, Publication Date, Title, volume, edition.  Publisher, City, State.

 

Formatting ACM In-Text Citations:

ACM uses bracketed numbers for in-text citation [1].  Sequential parenthetical citations are enclosed in square brackets and separated by commas, thus [1, 2]. When a citation is part of a sentence, the name of the author is NOT enclosed in brackets: "So we see that Burando et al. [1]..."

Formatting the Reference List: 

Reference list entries are placed into alphabetical order by author last name, and then each reference list item is numbered. 

For author names, ACM's preference is for full names and not initials or abbreviations.  Journal names may be abbreviated.

 

Reference List Examples:

Basic Format for a 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

 

Basic Format for a 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:

[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:

[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