How to format your references using the ACM Computing Surveys citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR). For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Find the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

[1]

Debra Fischer. 2012. Planetary science: early start for rocky planets. Nature 486, 7403 (June 2012), 331–332.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Yisong Y. Wan and Richard A. Flavell. 2007. Regulatory T-cell functions are subverted and converted owing to attenuated Foxp3 expression. Nature 445, 7129 (February 2007), 766–770.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

J. P. Vielle-Calzada, R. Baskar, and U. Grossniklaus. 2000. Delayed activation of the paternal genome during seed development. Nature 404, 6773 (March 2000), 91–94.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

T. Díaz-Santos, R. J. Assef, A. W. Blain, M. Aravena, D. Stern, C-W Tsai, P. Eisenhardt, J. Wu, H. D. Jun, K. Dibert, H. Inami, G. Lansbury, and F. Leclercq. 2018. The multiple merger assembly of a hyperluminous obscured quasar at redshift 4.6. Science (November 2018).

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

[1]

Jean Berthier, Kenneth A. Brakke, and Erwin Berthier. 2016. Open Microfluidics. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

A. D. Hocking, J. I. Pitt, Robert A. Samson, and U. Thrane (Eds.). 2006. Advances in Food Mycology. Springer US, Boston, MA.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

D. S. Rajeshwari, P. V. Rao, and V. Rajesh. 2016. Charge Pump with Improved High-Swing Cascode Current Source for Accurate Current Matching in DPLL. In Artificial Intelligence and Evolutionary Computations in Engineering Systems: Proceedings of ICAIECES 2015, Subhransu Sekhar Dash, M. Arun Bhaskar, Bijaya Ketan Panigrahi and Swagatam Das (eds.). Springer India, New Delhi, 39–47.

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for ACM Computing Surveys.

Blog post

[1]

Janet Fang. 2014. Oil Spill May Have Caused Heart Defects In Fish. IFLScience. Retrieved October 30, 2018 from https://www.iflscience.com/environment/oil-spill-may-have-caused-heart-defects-fish/

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

[1]

Government Accountability Office. 2012. Traffic Congestion: Road Pricing Can Help Reduce Congestion, but Equity Concerns May Grow. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Zack B. Hall II. 2017. General Relativistic Non-Radial Oscillations in Compact Stars. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

[1]

James Barron. 2017. In East Hampton, an Airport Is Viewed as a Roaring, Round-the-Clock Nuisance. New York Times, A16.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [2].
This sentence cites two references [2, 4].
This sentence cites four references [3, 6–8].

About the journal

Full journal title	ACM Computing Surveys
Abbreviation	ACM Comput. Surv.
ISSN (print)	0360-0300
ISSN (online)	1557-7341
Scope