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]

Deborah J. Thomas. 2004. Evidence for deep-water production in the North Pacific Ocean during the early Cenozoic warm interval. Nature 430, 6995 (July 2004), 65–68.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Andreas Heinrich and Sebastian Loth. 2011. Physics. A logical use for atoms. Science 332, 6033 (May 2011), 1039–1040.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Jean-Bernard Caron, Simon Conway Morris, and Christopher B. Cameron. 2013. Tubicolous enteropneusts from the Cambrian period. Nature 495, 7442 (March 2013), 503–506.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

T. C. Hales, D. L. Abt, E. D. Humphreys, and J. J. Roering. 2005. A lithospheric instability origin for Columbia River flood basalts and Wallowa Mountains uplift in northeast Oregon. Nature 438, 7069 (December 2005), 842–845.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Louis N. Molino Sr. 2006. Emergency Incident Management Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

Osborne P. Wiggins and Annette C. Allen (Eds.). 2011. Clinical Ethics and the Necessity of Stories: Essays in Honor of Richard M. Zaner. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Wenguo Liu and Alan F. T. Winfield. 2012. Distributed Autonomous Morphogenesis in a Self-Assembling Robotic System. In Morphogenetic Engineering: Toward Programmable Complex Systems, René Doursat, Hiroki Sayama and Olivier Michel (eds.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 89–113.

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]

Stephen Luntz. 2015. First Primate’s Lifestyle All In The Ankles. 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. 1999. Federal Communications Commission: Assessment and Collection of Regulatory Fees for Fiscal Year 1999. 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]

Hana Lea Thixton. 2017. Identification of Site-Specific Mycorrhizal Fungi Associates of the Federally Threatened Eastern Prairie Fringed Orchid (Platanthera leucophaea) in Illinois. Doctoral dissertation. Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL.

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 Wihbey and Mike Beaudet. 2016. Financial Disclosure, Wrapped in Secrecy. New York Times, A23.

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 [3, 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