CMST 247 - Programming I - Salina Campus

What exactly is ACM Style?

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world's largest educational and scientific society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM citation style is the only accepted format for publication in any of the ACM journals or magazines.  Here we will try to break down some of the difference between ACM and IEEE styles.

ACM Citations are very similar to IEEE in that they use a numerical notation format for in-text citations and that references are listed in the order in which they have been cited in the paper.  There are key differences; however, that make ACM a distinct and unique style.  See the examples below and use the linked ACM style guide.  This is the Official Guide from ACM.

In-Text Citations

The in-text citation style is as follows: For parenthetical citations we enclose the number of the reference, thus: [1].

Sequential parenthetical citations are enclosed in square brackets and separated by commas, thus [1, 2].

When a citation is part of a sentence, the name of the author is NOT enclosed in brackets, but the year is: "So we see that Burando et al. [1999]..."

Reference Citations

Reference linking and citation counts are facilitated by use of these standard reference formats. Please adhere to the reference formats that are used for ACM publications. 

ACM's preference is for full names and not initials or abbreviations.