How to format your references using the ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN). 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]

Rodney Arthur Herring. 2011. Physics. A new twist for electron beams. Science 331, 6014 (January 2011), 155–156.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Ji-Xin Cheng and X. Sunney Xie. 2015. Vibrational spectroscopic imaging of living systems: An emerging platform for biology and medicine. Science 350, 6264 (November 2015), aaa8870.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Wolfgang Rieping, Michael Habeck, and Michael Nilges. 2005. Inferential structure determination. Science 309, 5732 (July 2005), 303–306.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Yinmin Wang, Mingwei Chen, Fenghua Zhou, and En Ma. 2002. High tensile ductility in a nanostructured metal. Nature 419, 6910 (October 2002), 912–915.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Peter J. Costa. 2017. Applied Mathematics for the Analysis of Biomedical Data. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

Andrew V. Metcalfe. 2009. Introductory Time Series with R. Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Néstor Medina. 2016. Being Church as Latina/o Pentecostals. In Church in an Age of Global Migration: A Moving Body, Susanna Snyder, Joshua Ralston and Agnes M. Brazal (eds.). Palgrave Macmillan US, New York, NY, 65–80.

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 Sensor Networks.

Blog post

[1]

Danielle Andrew. 2015. What’s The Fastest (Fictional) Spaceship In The Universe? 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. 1981. Secret Service Has More Computer Capacity Than It Needs. 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]

Jacqueline G. Johnson. 2012. An Exploration of the Psychosocial Aspects of Weight Among College Students in the College Environment. Doctoral dissertation. George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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]

Ann Meier and Kelly Musick. 2012. Is the Family Dinner Overrated? New York Times, SR9.

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 [3,4,6,8].

About the journal

Full journal title	ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
Abbreviation	ACM Trans. Sens. Netw.
ISSN (print)	1550-4859
ISSN (online)	1550-4867
Scope

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