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]

Willy Aspinall. 2011. Check your legal position before advising others. Nature 477, 7364 (September 2011), 251.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Vivi Vajda and Stephen McLoughlin. 2004. Fungal proliferation at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. Science 303, 5663 (March 2004), 1489.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Andrew Sugden, Jesse Smith, and Elizabeth Pennisi. 2008. The future of forests. Science 320, 5882 (June 2008), 1435.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Nicola Smart, Sveva Bollini, Karina N. Dubé, Joaquim M. Vieira, Bin Zhou, Sean Davidson, Derek Yellon, Johannes Riegler, Anthony N. Price, Mark F. Lythgoe, William T. Pu, and Paul R. Riley. 2011. De novo cardiomyocytes from within the activated adult heart after injury. Nature 474, 7353 (June 2011), 640–644.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Center for Chemical Process Safety. 1995. Guidelines for Safe Process Operations and Maintenance. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

Jose Ramiro Martinez-de Dios. 2014. A Remote Integrated Testbed for Cooperating Objects. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Jan Drugowitsch and Alwyn M. Barry. 2008. A Principled Foundation for LCS. In Learning Classifier Systems: 10th International Workshop, IWLCS 2006, Seattle, MA, USA, July 8, 2006 and 11th International Workshop, IWLCS 2007, London, UK, July 8, 2007, Revised Selected Papers, Jaume Bacardit, Ester Bernadó-Mansilla, Martin V. Butz, Tim Kovacs, Xavier Llorà and Keiki Takadama (eds.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 77–95.

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]

Janet Fang. 2015. Cassini Made One Final Flyby of Saturn’s Moon Dione. IFLScience. Retrieved October 30, 2018 from https://www.iflscience.com/space/cassini-made-one-final-flyby-saturns-moon-dione/

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. 1992. Customs Automation: Effectiveness of Entry Summary Selectivity System Is Unknown. 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]

Ryan B. Green. 2013. Bluetooth telemetry system for a wearable electrocardiogram. Doctoral dissertation. Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS.

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]

Linda Rabbitt. 2013. Neither Teacher Nor Nurse. New York Times, BU9.

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, 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