How to format your references using the Journal of the ACM citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of the ACM (JACM). 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]

Lorraine A. Remer. 2014. Atmospheric science. Just add aerosols. Science 344, 6188 (June 2014), 1089.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Alan F. Cowman and Christopher J. Tonkin. 2011. Microbiology. A tail of division. Science 331, 6016 (January 2011), 409–410.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Shmuel M. Rubinstein, Gil Cohen, and Jay Fineberg. 2004. Detachment fronts and the onset of dynamic friction. Nature 430, 7003 (August 2004), 1005–1009.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

H. Ogawa, Y. Amagai, I. Koike, K. Kaiser, and R. Benner. 2001. Production of refractory dissolved organic matter by bacteria. Science 292, 5518 (May 2001), 917–920.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Temkar N. Ruckmongathan. 2014. Addressing Techniques of Liquid Crystal Displays. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

[1]

Ulrich Beck (Ed.). 2014. Ulrich Beck: Pioneer in Cosmopolitan Sociology and Risk Society. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Bart M. ter Haar Romeny. 2014. A Geometric Model for the Functional Circuits of the Visual Front-End. In Brain-Inspired Computing: International Workshop, BrainComp 2013, Cetraro, Italy, July 8-11, 2013, Revised Selected Papers, Lucio Grandinetti, Thomas Lippert and Nicolai Petkov (eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 35–50.

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 Journal of the ACM.

Blog post

[1]

Robin Andrews. 2016. A Bird’s Internal Compass Is Made Out Of A Light-Sensitive Protein. 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. 1981. More Can Be Done To Improve the Department of Agriculture’s Commodity Donation Program. 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]

Benjamin Peters. 2010. From Cybernetics to Cyber Networks: Norbert Wiener, the Soviet Internet, and the Cold War Dawn of Information Universalism. Doctoral dissertation. Columbia University, New York, NY.

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]

Ben Brantley. 2017. Amid the Clutter Lies Some Clarity. New York Times, C2.

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, 5, 7, 8].

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of the ACM
Abbreviation	J. ACM
ISSN (print)	0004-5411
ISSN (online)	1557-735X
Scope	Artificial Intelligence Hardware and Architecture Information Systems Software Control and Systems Engineering