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

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

Mark Peplow. 2013. Structure: the anatomy of sleep. Nature 497, 7450 (May 2013), S2-3.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Ira Mellman and Michel Nussenzweig. 2011. Retrospective. Ralph M. Steinman (1943-2011). Science 334, 6055 (October 2011), 466.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Etienne Danchin, Eric Wajnberg, and Richard H. Wagner. 2014. Avoiding pitfalls in estimating heritability with the common options approach. Sci. Rep. 4, (February 2014), 3974.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Benjamin D. Hopkins, Chantal Pauli, Xing Du, Diana G. Wang, Xiang Li, David Wu, Solomon C. Amadiume, Marcus D. Goncalves, Cindy Hodakoski, Mark R. Lundquist, Rohan Bareja, Yan Ma, Emily M. Harris, Andrea Sboner, Himisha Beltran, Mark A. Rubin, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Lewis C. Cantley. 2018. Publisher Correction: Suppression of insulin feedback enhances the efficacy of PI3K inhibitors. Nature 563, 7731 (November 2018), E24.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Nicholas P. Cheremisinoff and Anton Davletshin. 2010. A Guide to Safe Material and Chemical Handling. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

Yishai A. Feldman, Donald Kraft, and Tsvi Kuflik (Eds.). 2009. Next Generation Information Technologies and Systems: 7th International Conference, NGITS 2009, Haifa, Israel, June 16-18, 2009. Revised Selected Papers. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

L. Zhan, Z. Nie, J. Ye, Y. Wang, Y. Jin, N. Jahanshad, G. Prasad, G. I. de Zubicaray, K. L. McMahon, N. G. Martin, M. J. Wright, and P. M. Thompson. 2014. Multiple Stages Classification of Alzheimer’s Disease Based on Structural Brain Networks Using Generalized Low Rank Approximations (GLRAM). In Computational Diffusion MRI: MICCAI Workshop, Boston, MA, USA, September 2014, Lauren O’Donnell, Gemma Nedjati-Gilani, Yogesh Rathi, Marco Reisert and Torben Schneider (eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 35–44.

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 Information Systems.

Blog post

[1]

Ben Taub. 2016. Ancient Primate Brains Help Fill In The Gaps In Evolution Of Human Intelligence. IFLScience. Retrieved October 30, 2018 from https://www.iflscience.com/brain/ancient-primate-brains-help-fill-gaps-evolution-human-intelligence/

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. 1991. Computer Security: Hackers Penetrate DOD Computer Systems. 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]

Kimberly Cummins. 2015. A Mixed Methods Study on The Leader in Me Process: How Does Fostering Student Leadership Capacity Influence Behavior, Efficacy, and Achievement? Doctoral dissertation. University of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA.

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]

Lizette Alvarez. 2015. Families Hope Words Endure Past Shooting. New York Times, A1.

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 Information Systems
Abbreviation	ACM Trans. Inf. Syst.
ISSN (print)	1046-8188
ISSN (online)	1558-2868
Scope