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

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

Ellen E. Martin. 2015. Earth science: Ocean circulation and rapid climate change. Nature 517, 7532 (January 2015), 30–31.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

V. Vance and H. Vaucheret. 2001. RNA silencing in plants--defense and counterdefense. Science 292, 5525 (June 2001), 2277–2280.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Alexander I. Culley, Andrew S. Lang, and Curtis A. Suttle. 2003. High diversity of unknown picorna-like viruses in the sea. Nature 424, 6952 (August 2003), 1054–1057.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Rahul Rao, Gugang Chen, Leela Mohana Reddy Arava, Kaushik Kalaga, Masahiro Ishigami, Tony F. Heinz, Pulickel M. Ajayan, and Avetik R. Harutyunyan. 2013. Graphene as an atomically thin interface for growth of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes. Sci. Rep. 3, (2013), 1891.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Wu Hulin and Zhang Jin-Ting. 2006. Nonparametric Regression Methods for Longitudinal Data Analysis: Mixed-Effects Modeling Approaches. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

Luc Bougé, Martti Forsell, Jesper Larsson Träff, Achim Streit, Wolfgang Ziegler, Michael Alexander, and Stephen Childs (Eds.). 2008. Euro-Par 2007 Workshops: Parallel Processing: HPPC 2007, UNICORE Summit 2007, and VHPC 2007, Rennes, France, August 28-31, 2007, Revised Selected Papers. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Knut Beitzel and Andreas B. Imhoff. 2015. Post-traumatic Shoulder Stiffness. In Shoulder Stiffness: Current Concepts and Concerns, Eiji Itoi, Guillermo Arce, Gregory I. Bain, Ronald L. Diercks, Dan Guttmann, Andreas B. Imhoff, Augustus D. Mazzocca, Hiroyuki Sugaya and Yon-Sik Yoo (eds.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 45–48.

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 Information Systems.

Blog post

[1]

Danielle Andrew. 2015. NASA Tests Flying Saucer. 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. 2014. Higher Education: Education Should Strengthen Oversight of Schools and Accreditors [Reissued on January 22, 2015]. 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]

Kyle Spezia. 2015. Numerical Modeling of Fluid Flow and Heat Transfers in Porous Media. Doctoral dissertation. University of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA.

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]

James Wagner. 2016. Looking the Part of a Mets Starter, a Rookie Delivers. New York Times, SP2.

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 [4,5,7,8].

About the journal

Full journal title	ACM Transactions on Information Systems
Abbreviation	ACM Trans. Inf. Syst.
ISSN (print)	1046-8188
ISSN (online)	1558-2868
Scope

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