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

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

David Jones. 2001. DaedalusThe tense road. Nature 411, 6839 (June 2001), 758.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Silvia B. V. Ramos and Alain Laederach. 2014. Molecular biology: A second layer of information in RNA. Nature 505, 7485 (January 2014), 621–622.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

G. Kuhn, M. Hijri, and I. R. Sanders. 2001. Evidence for the evolution of multiple genomes in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Nature 414, 6865 (December 2001), 745–748.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

J. Q. You, Z. D. Wang, Wenxian Zhang, and Franco Nori. 2014. Encoding a qubit with Majorana modes in superconducting circuits. Sci. Rep. 4, (July 2014), 5535.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Howard P. Segal. 2012. Utopias. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK.

An edited book

[1]

Michael A. Peters (Ed.). 2012. Obama and The End of the American Dream: Essays in Political and Economic Philosophy. SensePublishers, Rotterdam.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Marc Anton, Oscar Castellani, and Catherine Guérin-Dubiard. 2007. Phosvitin. In Bioactive Egg Compounds, Rainer Huopalahti, Rosina López-Fandiño, Marc Anton and Rüdiger Schade (eds.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 17–24.

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 Database Systems.

Blog post

[1]

Elise Andrew. 2015. Populations Of Giant Pandas Rebound in China. IFLScience. Retrieved October 30, 2018 from https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/wild-giant-pandas-rebounding-china/

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. 2006. Higher Education: More Information Could Help Education Determine the Extent to Which Eligible Servicemembers Serving on Active Duty Benefited from Relief Provided by Lenders and Schools. 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]

Marlene J. Garcia. 2009. Teacher knowledge of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and effective classroom interventions. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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 Loomis. 2016. Interpreting Verdi and Alfredo Casella. New York Times, C4.

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 [2, 5, 6, 8].

About the journal

Full journal title	ACM Transactions on Database Systems
ISSN (print)	0362-5915
ISSN (online)	1557-4644
Scope	Information Systems