How to format your references using the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems citation style

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

Rachel Bernstein. 2015. Into the wilderness. Science 347, 6227 (March 2015), 1282.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

E. M. De La Cruz and T. D. Pollard. 2001. Structural biology. Actin’ up. Science 293, 5530 (July 2001), 616–618.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Kaushik Ragunathan, Gloria Jih, and Danesh Moazed. 2015. Epigenetics. Epigenetic inheritance uncoupled from sequence-specific recruitment. Science 348, 6230 (April 2015), 1258699.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Lei Gu, T. U. Tumkur, G. Zhu, and M. A. Noginov. 2014. Blue shift of spontaneous emission in hyperbolic metamaterial. Sci. Rep. 4, (June 2014), 4969.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Michael Port and Mina Samuels. 2009. The Think Big Manifesto. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

William R. Avison, Carol S. Aneshensel, Scott Schieman, and Blair Wheaton (Eds.). 2010. Advances in the Conceptualization of the Stress Process: Essays in Honor of Leonard I. Pearlin. Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Mohammad Ansari, Behram Khan, Mikel Luján, Christos Kotselidis, Chris Kirkham, and Ian Watson. 2010. Improving Performance by Reducing Aborts in Hardware Transactional Memory. In High Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers: 5th International Conference, HiPEAC 2010, Pisa, Italy, January 25-27, 2010. Proceedings, Yale N. Patt, Pierfrancesco Foglia, Evelyn Duesterwald, Paolo Faraboschi and Xavier Martorell (eds.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 35–49.

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 Programming Languages and Systems.

Blog post

[1]

Elise Andrew. 2015. How the 2011 Japanese Tsunami Changed the Face of Science. 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. 1994. Quality Assurance Independence. 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]

Danielle S. Jenkins. 2010. Comprehensive support for children of incarcerated parents and their families. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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]

James Wagner. 2017. Tough Architect of the Mets. New York Times, D1.

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, 4, 7, 8].

About the journal

Full journal title	ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems
Abbreviation	ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst.
ISSN (print)	0164-0925
ISSN (online)	1558-4593
Scope