How to format your references using the ACM Computing Surveys citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR). 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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]

Lionel Naccache. 2006. Psychology. Is she conscious? Science 313, 5792 (September 2006), 1395–1396.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Heidi J. Larson and Isaac Ghinai. 2011. Lessons from polio eradication. Nature 473, 7348 (May 2011), 446–447.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Giorgio F. Gilestro, Giulio Tononi, and Chiara Cirelli. 2009. Widespread changes in synaptic markers as a function of sleep and wakefulness in Drosophila. Science 324, 5923 (April 2009), 109–112.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Zhengfei Dai, Lei Xu, Guotao Duan, Tie Li, Hongwen Zhang, Yue Li, Yi Wang, Yuelin Wang, and Weiping Cai. 2013. Fast-response, sensitivitive and low-powered chemosensors by fusing nanostructured porous thin film and IDEs-microheater chip. Sci. Rep. 3, (2013), 1669.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Srinivasan Chandrasekaran. 2016. Health, Safety, and Environmental Management in Offshore and Petroleum Engineering. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

[1]

David Ben-Chaim, Yaffa Keret, and Bat-Sheva Ilany (Eds.). 2012. Ratio and Proportion: Research and Teaching in Mathematics Teachers’ Education (Pre- and In-Service Mathematics Teachers of Elementary and Middle School Classes). SensePublishers, Rotterdam.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Jon Espen Ingvaldsen and Jon Atle Gulla. 2008. Preprocessing Support for Large Scale Process Mining of SAP Transactions. In Business Process Management Workshops: BPM 2007 International Workshops, BPI, BPD, CBP, ProHealth, RefMod, semantics4ws, Brisbane, Australia, September 24, 2007, Revised Selected Papers, Arthur Ter Hofstede, Boualem Benatallah and Hye-Young Paik (eds.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 30–41.

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 Computing Surveys.

Blog post

[1]

Jonathan O`Callaghan. 2015. Space-Grown Salad To Be Eaten On ISS For The First Time. 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. 1996. Higher Education: Ensuring Quality Education From Proprietary Institutions. 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]

Patricia A. Bergh. 2009. Reconfiguring academic priorities: Through the eyes of Michigan community college Chief Academic Officers. Doctoral dissertation. University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ.

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 Baker. 2009. Redevelopment Project Doubles as Social Experiment. New York Times, B6.

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 Computing Surveys
Abbreviation	ACM Comput. Surv.
ISSN (print)	0360-0300
ISSN (online)	1557-7341
Scope