How to format your references using the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS). 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]

Ricki Lewis. 2008. A career at the museum. Nature 451, 7175 (January 2008), 218.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Alexandre Zénon and Richard J. Krauzlis. 2012. Attention deficits without cortical neuronal deficits. Nature 489, 7416 (September 2012), 434–437.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Todd Thorsen, Sebastian J. Maerkl, and Stephen R. Quake. 2002. Microfluidic large-scale integration. Science 298, 5593 (October 2002), 580–584.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Frank Keppler, John T. G. Hamilton, Marc Brass, and Thomas Röckmann. 2006. Methane emissions from terrestrial plants under aerobic conditions. Nature 439, 7073 (January 2006), 187–191.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Pierre Lévy. 2013. The Semantic Sphere 1. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

David J. Shayler. 2007. NASA’s Scientist-Astronauts. Praxis, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Dana Dabelea. 2009. Maternal-Fetal Contributors to the Insulin Resistance Syndrome in Youth. In Insulin Resistance: Childhood Precursors and Adult Disease, Philip Scott Zeitler and Kristen J. Nadeau (eds.). Humana Press, Totowa, NJ, 65–80.

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 Autonomous and Adaptive Systems.

Blog post

[1]

Stephen Luntz. 2015. Herbal Supplements Don’t Contain What They Claim. 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. 1997. Land Management Systems: BLM Faces Risks in Completing the Automated Land and Mineral Record System. 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]

Steven D. Cappell. 2010. Systematic analysis of essential genes reveals new regulators of G protein signaling. Doctoral dissertation. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.

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]

Sophia Kishkovsky (nyt). 2004. World Briefing | Europe: Russia: Demoted To “Not Free.” New York Times, A8.

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 Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems
ISSN (print)	1556-4665
ISSN (online)	1556-4703
Scope

Research and Writing Guides