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]

Stephen D. Houston. 2006. Anthropology. An example of Preclassic Mayan writing? Science 311, 5765 (March 2006), 1249–1250.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Andriy Marusyk and Kornelia Polyak. 2013. Cancer. Cancer cell phenotypes, in fifty shades of grey. Science 339, 6119 (February 2013), 528–529.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Kenneth D. Poss, Lindsay G. Wilson, and Mark T. Keating. 2002. Heart regeneration in zebrafish. Science 298, 5601 (December 2002), 2188–2190.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Tao Chen, Huisheng Peng, Michael Durstock, and Liming Dai. 2014. High-performance transparent and stretchable all-solid supercapacitors based on highly aligned carbon nanotube sheets. Sci. Rep. 4, (January 2014), 3612.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Patrice Simon, Thierry Brousse, and Frédéric Favier. 2017. Supercapacitors Based on Carbon or Pseudocapacitive Materials. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

Reneta P. Barneva, Valentin E. Brimkov, and Jake K. Aggarwal (Eds.). 2012. Combinatorial Image Analaysis: 15th International Workshop, IWCIA 2012, Austin, TX, USA, November 28-30, 2012. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Beata Zielosko. 2015. Sequential Optimization of $$\gamma $$ -Decision Rules Relative to Length, Coverage and Number of Misclassifications. In Transactions on Rough Sets XIX, James F. Peters, Andrzej Skowron, Dominik Ślȩzak, Hung Son Nguyen and Jan G. Bazan (eds.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 65–82.

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]

Elise Andrew. 2014. Tiny implanted sensor and your smartphone could help prevent blindness. IFLScience. Retrieved October 30, 2018 from https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/tiny-implanted-sensor-and-your-smartphone-could-help-prevent-blindness/

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. 1989. Job Training Partnership Act: Information on Training, Placements, and Wages of Male and Female Participants. 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]

Nancy M. Dammann. 2009. Living in the edge: Community based governance in the aquatic terrestrial zone. Doctoral dissertation. Columbia University, New York, NY.

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]

John Koblin. 2017. Stewart Will Perform Stand-Up On HBO. New York Times, B5.

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, 5, 7, 8].

About the journal

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