How to format your references using the ACM Transactions on Algorithms citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG). 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	Download the output style file
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]

Joan Massagué. 2004. G1 cell-cycle control and cancer. Nature 432, 7015 (November 2004), 298–306.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Veronika von Messling and Roberto Cattaneo. 2012. Virology. A henipavirus vaccine in sight. Science 337, 6095 (August 2012), 651–652.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Kenneth R. Koedinger, Julie L. Booth, and David Klahr. 2013. Education research. Instructional complexity and the science to constrain it. Science 342, 6161 (November 2013), 935–937.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Bong-Sub Lee, Geoffrey W. Burr, Robert M. Shelby, Simone Raoux, Charles T. Rettner, Stephanie N. Bogle, Kristof Darmawikarta, Stephen G. Bishop, and John R. Abelson. 2009. Observation of the role of subcritical nuclei in crystallization of a glassy solid. Science 326, 5955 (November 2009), 980–984.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Gary Grant. 2016. The Water Sensitive City. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

[1]

Christine Köppl, Geoffrey A. Manley, Arthur N. Popper, and Richard R. Fay (Eds.). 2014. Insights from Comparative Hearing Research. Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Mario Coppo, Mariangiola Dezani-Ciancaglini, Luca Padovani, and Nobuko Yoshida. 2015. A Gentle Introduction to Multiparty Asynchronous Session Types. In Formal Methods for Multicore Programming: 15th International School on Formal Methods for the Design of Computer, Communication, and Software Systems, SFM 2015, Bertinoro, Italy, June 15-19, 2015, Advanced Lectures, Marco Bernardo and Einar Broch Johnsen (eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 146–178.

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 Transactions on Algorithms.

Blog post

[1]

Alfredo Carpineti. 2017. Orbiter’s Shaky Photo Of The Moon Caused By Being Hit By A Meteoroid. IFLScience.

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. 2009. Polar-Orbiting Satellites: With Costs Increasing and Data Continuity at Risk, Improvements Needed in Tri-agency Decision Making. 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]

Maldonado Higinio Jorge. 2004. Relationships Among Poverty, Financial Services, Human Capital, Risk Coping, and Natural Resources: Evidence from El Salvador and Bolivia. Doctoral dissertation. Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.

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]

Ben Rothenberg. 2016. For Player, Time Away Pays Off in Upset. New York Times, B14.

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 [4,6–8].

About the journal

Full journal title	ACM Transactions on Algorithms
Abbreviation	ACM Trans. Algorithms
ISSN (print)	1549-6325
ISSN (online)	1549-6333
Scope