The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society.
The most recent ACM Citation Style and Reference Formats are available here: Citation Style and Reference Formats, and are quoted below.
For BibTex formatting, visit: ACM BibTeX Formatting
ACM IN-TEXT CITATION STYLE
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]. "
SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT REFERENCE FORMATS
Reference linking and citation counts are facilitated by use of these standard reference formats. Please adhere to the reference formats that we use for ACM publications. If you do not, and your paper is accepted, it will be returned to you for proper formatting.
By using your BibTeX (.bib) file with the appropriate .bst file (ACM Reference Format) your references should require minimum editing.
ACM's preference is for full names and not initials or abbreviations.
Here are examples of the most common reference types formatted for ACM journals.
Journal with page numbers
[1] Patricia S. Abril and Robert Plant. 2007. The patent holder's dilemma: Buy, sell, or troll? Commun. ACM 50, 1 (Jan. 2007), 36-44. https://doi.org/10.1145/1188913.1188915
Journal where articles are numbered
[1] Sarah Cohen, Werner Nutt, and Yehoshua Sagic. 2007. Deciding equivalences among conjunctive aggregate queries. J. ACM 54, 2, Article 5 (April 2007), 50 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/1219092.1219093
[1] David Kosiur. 2001. Understanding Policy-Based Networking (2nd. ed.). Wiley, New York, NY.
Book - anthology or compilation
[1] Ian Editor (Ed.). 2007. The title of book one (1st. ed.). The name of the series one, Vol. 9. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-09237-4
Multi-volume work
[1] Donald E. Knuth. 1997. The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 1: Fundamental Algorithms (3rd. ed.). Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc.
Article in a conference proceedings
[1] Sten Andler. 1979. Predicate path expressions. In Proceedings of the 6th. ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL '79), January 29 - 31, 1979, San Antonio, Texas. ACM Inc., New York, NY, 226-236. https://doi.org/10.1145/567752.567774
Patent
[1] Joseph Scientist. 2009. The fountain of youth. (Aug. 2009). Patent No. 12345, Filed July 1st., 2008, Issued Aug. 9th., 2009.
Informally published work (such as some technical reports and dissertations)
Technical Report:
[1] David Harel. 1978. LOGICS of Programs: AXIOMATICS and DESCRIPTIVE POWER. MIT Research Lab Technical Report TR-200. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Doctoral dissertation:
[1] Kenneth L. Clarkson. 1985. Algorithms for Closest-Point Problems (Computational Geometry). Ph.D. Dissertation. Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. UMI Order Number: AAT 8506171.
Master's Thesis:
[1] David A. Anisi. 2003. Optimal Motion Control of a Ground Vehicle. Master's thesis. Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden.
For an online document
*Website year can be found at the bottom of the website page or by viewing page properties/source to see when the page was last modified.
[1] Harry Thornburg. 2001. Introduction to Bayesian Statistics. (March 2001). Retrieved March 2, 2005 from http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/bayes/bayes.html
[2] ACM. Association for Computing Machinery: Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession. Retrieved from http://www.acm.org/.
[3] Wikipedia. 2017. WikipediA: the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.wikipedia.org/.
Video (two examples):