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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for ACM Transactions on Computation Theory (TOCT). 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]

Agustín Sánchez-Lavega. 2005. How long is the day on Saturn? Science 307, 5713 (February 2005), 1223–1224.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Valerie W. C. Soo and Thomas K. Wood. 2013. Antitoxin MqsA represses curli formation through the master biofilm regulator CsgD. Sci. Rep. 3, (November 2013), 3186.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Neal G. Copeland, Nancy A. Jenkins, and Stephen J. O’Brien. 2002. Genomics. Mmu 16--comparative genomic highlights. Science 296, 5573 (May 2002), 1617–1618.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Feng Wang, Yuanbo Zhang, Chuanshan Tian, Caglar Girit, Alex Zettl, Michael Crommie, and Y. Ron Shen. 2008. Gate-variable optical transitions in graphene. Science 320, 5873 (April 2008), 206–209.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Aaron Vegh. 2010. Web Development with the Mac®. Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, USA.

An edited book

[1]

Runtong Zhang. 2005. Fuzzy Control of Queuing Systems. Springer, London.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A. G. Krishna Menon. 2015. Between the Colonial, the Global, and the Local—Civilizing India’s Past under Different Regimes. In Cultural Heritage as Civilizing Mission: From Decay to Recovery, Michael Falser (ed.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 67–82.

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 Transactions on Computation Theory.

Blog post

[1]

Elise Andrew. 2015. We’re All Mammals – So Why Do We Look So Different? 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. 1994. [Comments on DOD Data Center Consolidation Plan]. 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]

Nadine P. Frederique. 2010. The effectiveness of school based intensive probation for reducing recidivism: An evaluation of Maryland’s Spotlight on Schools program. Doctoral dissertation. University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD.

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]

George P. Shultz. 2015. O’Reilly, Wrong on Reagan. New York Times, A31.

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 Computation Theory
ISSN (print)	1942-3454
ISSN (online)	1942-3462
Scope