How to format your references using the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM). 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]

Vanessa Díaz. 2007. Researchers without frontiers. Nature 446, 7134 (March 2007), 466.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Attila D. Kovács and David A. Pearce. 2013. Location- and sex-specific differences in weight and motor coordination in two commonly used mouse strains. Sci. Rep. 3, (2013), 2116.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Long Cai, Chiraj K. Dalal, and Michael B. Elowitz. 2008. Frequency-modulated nuclear localization bursts coordinate gene regulation. Nature 455, 7212 (September 2008), 485–490.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

R. Shayna Rosenbaum, Donald T. Stuss, Brian Levine, and Endel Tulving. 2007. Theory of mind is independent of episodic memory. Science 318, 5854 (November 2007), 1257.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

David A. Vaccari, Peter F. Strom, and James E. Alleman. 2005. Environmental Biology for Engineers and Scientists. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

Nick B. Firoozye. 2016. Managing Uncertainty, Mitigating Risk: Tackling the Unknown in Financial Risk Assessment and Decision Making. Palgrave Macmillan UK, London.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Vivian Gahtan and Barbara Robinson. 2014. How to Read the Literature, Develop a Hypothesis, and Design an Experiment for Basic Science and Translational Research. In Success in Academic Surgery: Basic Science, Melina R. Kibbe and Scott A. LeMaire (eds.). Springer, London, 41–49.

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 Software Engineering and Methodology.

Blog post

[1]

Elise Andrew. 2015. New Study Suggests Viruses Are Alive, And That They Share An Ancestor With Modern Cells. 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. 1994. Tax Systems Modernization: Automated Underreporter Project Shows Need for Human Resource Planning. 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]

Christophe Douet. 2010. The influence of an overseas trip to France on high school students studying French, four years after graduation. 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]

Mary Williams Walsh. 2017. Puerto Rico’s Power Agency Defaults Over Debt. New York Times, B2.

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 [4–6, 8].

About the journal

Full journal title	ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Abbreviation	ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.
ISSN (print)	1049-331X
ISSN (online)	1557-7392
Scope