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

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

J. Adkins. 2001. Paleoclimate. Dating--vive la différence. Science 294, 5548 (November 2001), 1844–1845.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

L. F. Abbott and Wade G. Regehr. 2004. Synaptic computation. Nature 431, 7010 (October 2004), 796–803.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

David D. McKemy, Werner M. Neuhausser, and David Julius. 2002. Identification of a cold receptor reveals a general role for TRP channels in thermosensation. Nature 416, 6876 (March 2002), 52–58.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Thierry Cheutin, Adrian J. McNairn, Thomas Jenuwein, David M. Gilbert, Prim B. Singh, and Tom Misteli. 2003. Maintenance of stable heterochromatin domains by dynamic HP1 binding. Science 299, 5607 (January 2003), 721–725.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Harold Kerzner and Carl Belack. 2010. Managing Complex Projects. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

Richard Bertram. 2015. Mathematical Analysis of Complex Cellular Activity (1st ed. 2015 ed.). Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

H. Cruse, V. Dürr, M. Schilling, and J. Schmitz. 2009. A Bottom-Up Approach for Cognitive Control. In Spatial Temporal Patterns for Action-Oriented Perception in Roving Robots, Paolo Arena and Luca Patanè (eds.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 179–218.

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 Embedded Computing Systems.

Blog post

[1]

Elise Andrew. 2015. Darwin’s Finches Highlight The Unity Of All Life. IFLScience. Retrieved October 30, 2018 from https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/darwin-s-finches-highlight-unity-all-life/

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. NASA Aeronautics: Efforts to Preserve U.S. Leadership in the Aeronautics Industry Are Limited. 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]

Krista Karch. 2014. An investigation of perceptions about smart mobile phone usage as an instructional tool in a high school classroom. Doctoral dissertation. Capella University, Minneapolis, MN.

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]

Susan Dominus. 2015. “Come as You Are.” New York Times, MM144.

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, 7, 8].

About the journal

Full journal title	ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
Abbreviation	ACM Trans. Embed. Comput. Syst.
ISSN (print)	1539-9087
ISSN (online)	1558-3465
Scope	Hardware and Architecture Software