How to format your references using the ACM Transactions on Database Systems citation style

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

Birger Lindberg Møller. 2010. Plant science. Dynamic metabolons. Science 330, 6009 (December 2010), 1328–1329.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

D. Garcia-Castellanos and A. Villaseñor. 2011. Messinian salinity crisis regulated by competing tectonics and erosion at the Gibraltar arc. Nature 480, 7377 (December 2011), 359–363.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Graeme Coulthard, William Erb, and Varinder K. Aggarwal. 2012. Stereocontrolled organocatalytic synthesis of prostaglandin PGF2α in seven steps. Nature 489, 7415 (September 2012), 278–281.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Maria A. Schumacher, Tiffany C. Glover, Anthony J. Brzoska, Slade O. Jensen, Thomas D. Dunham, Ronald A. Skurray, and Neville Firth. 2007. Segrosome structure revealed by a complex of ParR with centromere DNA. Nature 450, 7173 (December 2007), 1268–1271.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Michael J. Flynn and Wayne Luk. 2011. Computer System Design. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

Steven J. Frucht. 2005. Movement Disorder Emergencies: Diagnosis and Treatment. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Brian R. Moyer. 2014. The Role of Pharmacokinetics and Allometrics in Imaging: Practical Issues and Considerations. In Pharmaco-Imaging in Drug and Biologics Development: Fundamentals and Applications, Brian R. Moyer, Narayan P. S. Cheruvu and Tom C-C Hu (eds.). Springer, New York, NY, 113–131.

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 Database Systems.

Blog post

[1]

Tom Hale. 2017. Antarctica Has Millions More Adélie Penguins Than We Thought. IFLScience. Retrieved October 30, 2018 from https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/antarctica-has-millions-more-adlie-penguins-than-we-thought/

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. 1976. GAO Lead Division Plan for Automatic Data Processing. 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]

William Kong. 2010. The Role of MicroRNA-155 in Human Breast Cancer. Doctoral dissertation. University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.

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]

Kate Kelly. 2017. Edge or Liability? New York Times, B1.

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 [4–6, 8].

About the journal

Full journal title	ACM Transactions on Database Systems
ISSN (print)	0362-5915
ISSN (online)	1557-4644
Scope	Information Systems