How to format your references using the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems citation style

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

Ralph F. Keeling. 2005. Comment on “The ocean sink for anthropogenic CO2.” Science 308, 5729 (June 2005), 1743; author reply 1743.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Peter R. Grant and B. Rosemary Grant. 2014. Evolutionary biology: speciation undone. Nature 507, 7491 (March 2014), 178–179.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Eric A. Gaucher, Sridhar Govindarajan, and Omjoy K. Ganesh. 2008. Palaeotemperature trend for Precambrian life inferred from resurrected proteins. Nature 451, 7179 (February 2008), 704–707.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

J. Braine, U. Lisenfeld, P. A. Duc, S. Leon, and P. A. Due. 2000. Formation of molecular gas in the tidal debris of violent galaxy-galaxy interactions. Nature 403, 6772 (February 2000), 867–869.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Frank J. Fabozzi. 2009. Institutional Investment Management. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

Jose Rosenblatt, Eckhard R. Podack, Glen N. Barber, and Augusto Ochoa (Eds.). 2014. Advances in Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy. Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Roberto Rampazzo, Mauro D’Onofrio, Simone Zaggia, George Paturel, Alessandro Boselli, Laura Ferrarese, Bianca M. Poggianti, Nils A. S. Bergvall, Valentina Karachentseva, Martha P. Haynes, Riccardo Giovanelli, Luciana Bianchi, Ginevra Trinchieri, and Jonathan Bland-Hawthorn. 2016. The Impact of Surveys. In From the Realm of the Nebulae to Populations of Galaxies: Dialogues on a Century of Research, Mauro D’Onofrio, Roberto Rampazzo and Simone Zaggia (eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 381–477.

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 Programming Languages and Systems.

Blog post

[1]

Elise Andrew. 2015. Two Critically Endangered Tamarins Freeze To Death Due To Zookeeper Error. IFLScience. Retrieved October 30, 2018 from https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/two-critically-endangered-tamarins-freeze-death-due-zookeeper-error/

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. Local Tax Abatement. 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]

Sandeep Gade. 2017. Design and Implementation of Hybrid Hyperchaotic Sequences for Chaos-Based Communication Systems. 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]

James Wagner. 2017. Bullpen Surrenders Wheeler’s Lead, but the Mets Prevail. New York Times, B15.

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 [5–8].

About the journal

Full journal title	ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems
Abbreviation	ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst.
ISSN (print)	0164-0925
ISSN (online)	1558-4593
Scope